


Never Wrote A Letter

by bomberqueen17



Series: Home Out In The Wind [3]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Badass Finn, F/M, M/M, Motion Sickness, Past Brainwashing, Praise Kink, Skywalker Drama, Stormtrooper Culture, TIE pilots, Vertigo - Freeform, armitage hux has a cameo, father/son bullshit, hair petting, moderate Poe Dameron torture, smartass droids, space latinos, too much plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-07-19 00:58:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 89,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7338163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thrilling conclusion, more or less, to the Home Out In The Wind saga. Featuring all the ambitious plot threads getting untangled. Sure! And more cheesy pick-up lines. <br/><em>I was young when I left home</em><br/><em>and I been out ramblin' round</em><br/><em>and I never wrote a letter to my home</em></p>
<p>I tagged for the OT3 relationship because it seemed easiest, but that's not how we're starting out. And I'm back to song lyrics; I just couldn't, last installment, because there wasn't enough of Poe alive to sing. But he's alive again, enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Content To Die

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 1's title, Content To Die, is from this verse:  
>  _I wish I was a little sparrow_  
>  _and I had wings and could fly so high_  
>  _I'd fly to the arms of my false true lover_  
>  _and there I'd be content to die_  
> [Fair and Tender Ladies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsC9j53KglE), this time a recording by Danu, which now I think on it doesn't have this verse but it's pretty anyway.  
>  _____________

  


Leia steeled herself, taking a moment to collect her thoughts outside the door. She knew this wouldn’t be an easy meeting, but it wasn’t one she could avoid. Ever since Arana had brought back his astonishing news, she’d been trying to prepare herself.

There were so few of them left, now, who would remember— any of it. Alderaan, the Rebellion, the hope and chaos, the rawness of the loss before time and history had enshrined it in platitudes and misdirected reverence. The new loss, the place where Han had always been, was a gaping, aching void next to her heart, and she didn’t know how to fix it. She was going to be working around it the rest of her life.

But if anyone knew anything about living in voids, it was her and the man waiting for her; they’d both lost more than could be counted, and survived it. And now here they were again, again twinned in loss, though his was perhaps less absolute and final than hers.

Perhaps.

She breathed out, and went through the door, and the man waiting for her was sprawled in a chair in such a familiar posture it could have been thirty years ago.

“Dameron,” she said, like his name had been punched out of her chest.

Kes Dameron stood up slowly, unfolding to his full height-- taller than Poe, much shorter than Han, but he had always looked bigger than he was, and he still did. Broad-shouldered, narrow but sturdy-built, dark hair now peppered with gray, neatly-trimmed beard, clear brown eyes that looked straight through you, hawk nose.

The years had been kind to him, she almost thought, and then she remembered just what the years had done, and squashed the thought. He looked well, strong and capable as he had in his youth, but his familiar hooded eyes were black holes of raw aching loss. He was hard-edged, now, in a way he never had seemed to be before.

“Leia Organa,” he said.

“You still think I’m cursed, don’t you,” she said.

He’d blamed her, indirectly, for Alderaan’s destruction. With it, it had taken his mother, and most of the elders of his near-vanished people. He had only told her as much after Shara had died, when he’d blamed her for that too. It had been worse than the usual grief-stricken lashing out, though. Kes wasn’t a temperamental man, particularly; he could be quick to anger as to laughter, but he tended not to make inappropriate snap judgements. He wasn’t the galaxy’s fastest thinker, but he had an inexorable, grinding drive toward comprehension. He was not a man to trifle with.

So, he hadn’t blamed her like that, with the easy raw snap of grief. He’d just told her, brutal but not angry, that she was dragging a curse with her, and it had taken everyone he loved. She hadn’t really understood it, then. But she did now.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, his Iberican spiky-soft and crisp as she remembered, so different from her own dialect. And he knew the difference; he’d lived on Alderaan. He was one of few who really remembered, who could really hear the difference.

“You’re right, though,” she said. “I am.” Unexpectedly, something in her chest wavered, to see him again, after everything. “I am cursed. I destroy everything I touch.”

Kes regarded her for a long moment, and at first his expression looked like he was carved from stone, but after a moment he let out a breath and just looked tired. “You’re not the root of the curse,” he said. “It’s not you, Organa. You’re just caught in it. At this point, I think everyone is.”

Her voice caught in her throat for a moment, and she finally managed, “Leia.” Nobody called her that anymore and she needed someone to, besides Luke. Someone who really remembered. Kes had known her longer than Luke had.

Kes had known her real family, and she his.

“Leia,” Kes said, and she swallowed hard against inappropriate emotion, mastering herself.

“Kes,” she said. It came out barely more than a whisper. “I’m sorry. I— Poe’s greatest ambition seemed to be to die for me and I didn’t exactly talk him out of it. I meant to, but I also couldn’t afford to.”

Kes took a step closer to her. “It’s impossible to talk Poe out of anything,” he said. “He made his choices and that was that.”

“He isn’t dead,” Leia said. “Luke prevented the bounty hunters from catching him, and he was on the mend, but he had to go into hiding and we don’t know his current status.”

“I’m not here to try to save him,” Kes said.

Leia blinked at him in surprise. “You’re not?” She’d just sort of assumed that was what he wanted.

Kes shook his head. “That’s not really what I’m good at,” he said. “And I don’t think that’s what he wants from me. They say he’s out there with some Jedi girl. I figure, either he’ll save himself, she’ll save him, or nobody can. There’s no point wasting effort and getting in his way.”

“Then,” she said, faltering a little. “Then why are you here?”

“You know what I’m good at,” he said. “I know you need what help you can get.”

“You told me my cause was futile,” Leia said, tossing her head a little.

“It is,” Kes said. “It was futile 30 years ago, and this is as far as it’s gotten us. We’ve circled around and we’re doing the same thing again.”

“So why help?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I have nothing left,” he said.

“You’ve worked so hard on Yavin 4,” Leia said, astonished. He’d thrown himself into developing the community, and had been a pillar of society there ever since the settlement had been established. She knew for a fact that it was his tireless networking and petitioning and backbreaking work, as well as his shameless exploitation of any connections he had among the Outer Rim gangs, that had established the station at Yavin as the cargo hub it was. And he had a comprehensive apprenticeship program, enough so that there had been quiet jokes that he was making up for his lack of blood family by acquiring himself an army of young proteges. He clearly had poured whatever frustrated paternal instincts Poe’s absence had left into building anew. “How can you leave that behind?”

“I turned it over to Fronteras,” Kes said. He’d always argued against letting any one of the gangs overtly control his harbor; Leia had always watched with great interest as he’d managed to balance it. “They owe me enough favors now that they’ve agreed to tolerate other gangs.”

“Will they really, though?” Leia had considered and rejected trying to balance the gangs like that. Giving any one precedence was bound to set off a war. That was the whole current problem: the First Order was one of these gangs that someone had given way too much precedence to.

“Etto will,” Kes said. She knew Etto, he was one of the patriarchs now in the Essin clan. She’d heard something about him recently, and frowned trying to remember it.

“He lost his wife at Hosnia,” she said.

“And daughter,” Kes said, “and grandson.”

“Oh no,” Leia said, sparing a moment for sympathy. Etto was one of the nice ones, she knew that; some of Fronteras had vicious, bloodthirsty reputations, but never the Essin clan, and some of that was certainly Etto’s firm-but-kind influence.

“I left him in charge,” Kes said, “and he loves me enough that he will keep the station by my rules, in my memory.”

“In your memory,” Leia said, letting her eyebrows rise with her surprise.

“I have come here to die for Leia Organa,” Kes said. “It was inevitable. There is nothing else left for me.”

  


__________

  


“Stop thinking about it,” Poe said quietly, tiredly. Using the crutch was exhausting and he was drastically out of shape and smelled terrible and hated himself and hated the way the world was shifting in an ebb and flow that should have been predictable enough to ride but now that he was tired and battered he kept missing it and falling off the edge. He was leaning almost as much on Rey as on the crutch.

“I could just,” she said, biting her lip, and he was tired of the argument and had switched sides, but so had she, now, so they were in opposition again, and still fucking arguing, which had rendered the entire point of switching sides moot..

“No,” he said. “You made your choice, you drew your moral line in the sand, and you should stick to it. We’ll find another way. You’re not using the Force to swindle anybody, and that’s that.” He had to stop a moment and catch his breath, arms shaking. They’d been all over the little port city, had researched all the different trading posts and who charged what for what, and who was paying for day labor and, mostly, who wanted to laugh at Poe’s apparently-drunken antics as he tripped over every fucking curb in the city, and sometimes, over nothing at all.

“We just don’t have time,” Rey said. “And you’re damaging yourself.”

“I’m fucking _fine_ ,” Poe said. He started moving again, and staggered until she caught up with him and grabbed him around the waist again. He slung his arm over her shoulder; there was no point resisting. He’d tried, and he’d just wound up falling down and skinning his knees and the knuckles of the hand holding the crutch.

He glanced down the alley they were passing, and there was someone in it, two someones, one on their knees, and he hastily averted his eyes. Rey glanced over as well, coolly assessing, no sign of embarrassment. “I’ve never resorted to that for money,” she said, after they’d passed, “but I guess there it is.”

“No,” Poe said, horrified, and then thought about it for a moment. No, not the way he looked now; nobody’d want him, and it was too dangerous that he’d get recognized. But, hell. You didn’t need a lot of balance, on your knees.

“Don’t,” she said, smacking the back of his head. “We can’t risk you like that and I won’t do it. If it comes to that, I’d rather steal.”

_Fucking mind-readers_ , he thought, not with any real venom but because it might amuse her, and sure enough, she huffed out a quiet almost-laugh. “Smartass,” she said.

“My best feature,” he answered.

“Hah,” she said, “says you.” She jerked her chin at a doorway up ahead. “There’s the pub, let’s see about your pick-up lines.”

“Most of ‘em work better if you can stand up straight,” Poe said, out of sheer bitter reflex, but let her haul him in.

There were a couple little watering holes in town. This was the biggest one, and had rooms to rent. Out of their price range, like just about everything was, but it wasn’t a fancy joint. The other watering holes mostly seemed to be aimed at locals, and Rey had steered them past without even going in; she could get a pretty good read on things without going through the door, which was one up on Poe. But this one, she’d said, had a lot of activity, and she could be sure that at least the bartender on duty was pretty First Order-hostile.

The bartender on duty was a big Shozer, bigger and older than Goss. Poe staggered up to the bar and made a point of comically looking up, and up, and up, and up at the looming creature. “Whoa,” he said. “Thass a big dude.”

Rey had practiced her quietly-resigned expressions a lot. “Two small firewhiskeys,” she said, “and a side of ice, if you please.”

“Well now,” the Shozer said slowly, bending to peer at them. “Well-ll-ll now. You folks look new in town.”

“Does it cost extra to dispense with too much small talk right off the bat?” Rey asked wearily. Poe could have kissed her.

“Well excuse me,” the Shozer said, glowering at them.

“Aw don’t be like that, honey,” Poe said, and then turned to beam up at the Shozer. “Yeah we just got in! Nice place y’all got here.”

“Somethin’ crawl up the lady’s ass and die?” the Shozer asked.

Poe gave him a leering grin, and Rey made a disgusted face. “Promise you nobody’s died up there yet,” he said, keeping his trepidation at making such a filthy joke at Rey’s expense from showing, largely by dint of elaborate eyebrow choreography.

“Joke about it enough and you might,” Rey said through gritted teeth, and Poe had a bad moment thinking maybe he’d really offended her. “Shut your face or I _will_ leave you here.”

“Girl’s a little uptight,” the Shozer said, but he got down the bottle of whiskey. “Maybe I better make it a double, for her.”

“Maybe you better,” Poe said, clicking his tongue and pointing at the Shozer like he’d made a really good rhetorical point. It struck him that Rey would probably have just physically assaulted him if he’d really offended her.

“There’s not enough whiskey on this entire planet,” Rey hissed at him. “And you’re already drunk! I don’t know where you keep it, that you always have more!”

“Man’s gotta have secrets,” Poe said, and winked at the Shozer, then remembered he was wearing dark glasses, so he mock-saluted with one finger against the brim of his hat instead.

The Shozer laughed. “Ten credits,” he said, putting two glasses down-- true to his word, one of them was much larger than the other and had more whiskey in it. He produced a third cup with ice chunks in it and set it down with exaggerated care next to the larger tumbler.

Poe whistled as if this were exorbitant, moving his crutch to the crook of his elbow to fumble in his pockets. Rey pulled a twenty-credit chip out instead and handed it over. “Thank you,” she said. The Shozer made change, handed it back, and Rey pocketed it, then picked up all three glasses, flipping one of the one-credit chips onto the bar with an easy gesture.

Right; Poe would probably spill his if he tried to carry it. He swallowed bitter resentment at his own uselessness, got his crutch back into position, and followed her over to a well-shadowed booth in the corner. She set their drinks down, and he sat, and snaked a hand out and pulled her into his lap. If he’d offended her, now was the time to find out.

She settled on his lap, rolling her eyes, but she seemed comfortable enough, and even gave him an indulgent little smile. “Hey, doll,” he said. “Come here often?”

She snickered at him. In the cover of her shadow, he pulled his glasses off, sat back and looked around the room. She picked up her whiskey glass, sniffed at it carefully, and then took the tiniest sip.

He bit his lip so he didn’t laugh as she shuddered. “Oh,” she whispered, “that is _nasty_.”

“Have you not had it before?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I just watched a lot of holovids back on the last planet. The hard-boiled detective drinks it without ice but his lady friend always gets ice on the side.”

Poe snapped his fingers. “I’ve seen that one,” he said. It had been on in a room he’d been in, anyway. Some Corellian drama, he thought. It had passed his no Ibericans test, and it was sad that was the main thing he looked for nowadays but he was just so fucking fed up with the fake thugs who looked like his dad. He was getting crotchety in his old age, now.

“I had no idea it was _vath poison_ ,” she said. “Stars, that’s _foul_.”

Poe picked up his tumbler, stole a couple of ice cubes from the cup, and dropped them in. “I don’t like it much either,” he said. He took a drink from the tumbler, and it burned all the way down, but it kind of numbed his tongue as it went, and also unlocked some of the painful tightness behind his eyes, and he wondered suddenly why he hadn’t thought of that before.

Rey tilted her head, and pushed his hat back to look into his face. “I felt that. It helps with the pain, though, doesn’t it,” she said, and she smoothed her fingers gently across his forehead, pushing his hair away from his skin where sweat had stuck it down. He was actually freezing, really not wearing enough clothing, but he was in such pathetic shape that he was soaked in sweat from the exertion of trying to walk with the crutch, and it was all clammy and cold in the small of his back and the back of his neck. Ugh.

“A lot,” he said, and took another swallow. “Holy shit. I feel like a dumbass for not thinking of it before.”

“Well,” she said, “we didn’t have any, so it was moot.”

“Yeah but it wasn’t that expensive,” he said. “Coulda got some.” It felt really good to close his eyes and let her touch his face. It felt really nice, too, to have her warm solid weight anchoring him to this sturdy chair. She wasn’t gross and sweaty, and she smelled pleasantly of herself. Combined with the alcohol, he was improbably feeling better than he had in days.

She turned her head suddenly, and Poe had to take a moment to blink his eyes open; they’d gone unfocused and out of his control. The door swung open and someone came in. “Local,” Poe murmured, but it was a guess.

She nodded, and turned her attention back to him. He had his arm looped loosely around her waist, and the longer she sat, the more comfortable she clearly became, un-tensing more of her muscles and settling down. “Really, aren’t I heavy?” she murmured.

“No,” he said truthfully. He wasn’t going to be a creep and think about her body. But then she pulled his hat off and put it on her own head, perched jauntily over the workmanlike braid he’d done for her, and put her hands in his hair and that was a problem. He took a drink to cover his reaction. “Hey.”

“It’s safe, for now,” she said. “I’ll keep watch.”

“You sure about that?” he asked.

She dug her fingers in a little. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve an excellent vantage point, and we just have to wait now, right?”

It felt incredibly good, and he didn’t have the strength to tell her not to. She was just petting his hair, combing her fingers gently through it where she could, avoiding pulling on tangles, and he sighed deeply and gave up on dignity, letting his neck go mostly limp and tipping his head down into her grasp. Combined with the pain relief from the alcohol, it was better than he’d felt in weeks.

She laughed softly. “There,” she said. “Let go a little. It’s not so bad, is it?”

“Hnn,” he said, or something like it. She laughed softly again, and carded her fingers through his hair until they got caught in a tangle. She stopped right away and carefully worked out the knot, then went back to work.

“It keeps wrapping around my fingers,” she said, and giggled. “It’s like it wants to hug me.”

“Por supuesto,” he said, brain gone fuzzy, and realized it had come out in Iberican. “Of course,” he amended in Basic.

She turned her head, but didn’t stop combing through his hair. She was watching the others around them. He let himself space out, the alcohol and the sensation pulling him out of the ceaseless horrible sickening spin that had been his entire world for the last week or was it two now? Stars, how long had it been? Eternity, maybe. “When you don’t drink so much you’re so much nicer to me,” she said, a little more clearly. Someone was nearby. He should probably recover himself. Only this was probably a more convincing facsimile of drunkenness than he’d be able to perform otherwise.

“Pero te quiero, baby,” he slurred, eyes half-shut, blissful. _But I love you_ , and it was too easy to say. “I’m not drunk, just intoxicated by your beauty.”

“Stars, you’re such a piece of junk,” she said, sounding slightly fond and resigned. She was a better actress than he’d expected.

“Pero tu me quieres,” he said, _but you love me_ , and it was nice to pretend. Always a dangerous thing, for a spy to become too invested in a false persona, but he just felt so good for the first time in so long. He let his forehead rest against her shoulder. “I forgot the rest of my cheesy pick-up lines.”

“You don’t need them, surely,” she said. “I’m already in your lap.”

“‘M jus’ tryin’ to give you the full experience,” he said. “Ooh ooh. Uh, that’s a nice shirt, think I could talk you out of it?”

She laughed, and pulled her hand out of his hair, which made him sad, but it was only so she could reach over and pick up her glass, to take another drink. He could tell she really did, because it made her shudder again. “Nobody’s going to believe you’re really used to drinking that stuff,” he murmured softly, amused.

“Hush, you,” she said, and added, near-silently, “someone’s watching.”

“Ah,” he said, and kissed her shoulder, but where it was covered by fabric; he kissed across her collarbone toward her neck, stopping short of her skin, and used the gesture to raise his head to look over her shoulder. There were three people sitting at the bar, one of them in a discussion with the bartender and the other two having a desultory conversation with each other. None were looking at them. He nuzzled his cheek against her shoulder and looked the other way.

There was a woman moving slowly around the room picking up dirty glasses, who happened to be looking Poe’s way. Past her, there was a man sitting at another of the booths, and he was watching them. Poe squinted at him, dismissing the woman as having a plausible excuse for lurking, and kept his eyes moving past, tucking his face back into Rey’s neck. “Can’t get a read,” Poe admitted quietly.

“He knows something, she doesn’t seem to but I’m not sure,” Rey murmured, and pulled her fingers out of his hair, sitting back a little to cradle his jaw in her hands. “Are you going to behave yourself and not embarrass me?” she asked a little louder.

“I’d never embarrass you,” he said, looking up at her, watching the man at the booth from the corner of his wavering gaze.

“Except for how you do all the time,” she said, letting her hands trail down from his jaw to his shoulders. The man stood up from the booth, and approached them, and Rey dug her fingers into Poe’s shoulders a little, ready to spring up and fight. Poe kept his face turned up to her adoringly.

The man pulled out the other chair at the booth and sat down. “So,” he said without preamble, “not to intrude on the apparent honeymoon, but you folks seem pretty new in town.”

“It’s not a honeymoon,” Rey said, bristling. Poe couldn’t tell what she was bristling at. Maybe just in general.

“Hoo, ee, sorry,” the man said, holding his hands up. Behind him, the woman set her stack of glasses on the bar, and turned to watch, arms crossed over her chest. She was big and sturdy-built but approximately human, and clearly worked here. Just as clearly, she looked like she expected trouble from this guy. “Anyway. I was just wondering if you had a line on parts for a RT-407 power droid? It’s the kinda thing you just have to ask around for.”

It was a Resistance codeword, and it was within date, one of the ones he’d been given for this mission, but something about the guy’s expression-- and Poe hadn’t set up a location, they shouldn’t have known he was here, he’d contacted them without coordinates and had just said he was on the planet.

Rey frowned down at Poe. “I don’t think we have one of those,” she said, genuinely baffled. “I’ve never even heard of that model.” But she was reading something from his face, or from his mind, and hesitated. “Do we?”

“I think you got that model number wrong,” Poe said. “They never extended the RT series past the three hundreds, I’d swear to it.”

“No,” the man said, “I’m quite sure of it, I have the number plate, RT-407.”

Yeah, it was a code word all right, but the guy was way too eager. “Whatever you say, pal,” Poe said. “Either way, I don’t got nothin’ like that.”

The guy’s expression went a little hard, and he sat forward. “Where’d you say you were from?”

“Didn’t say,” Poe said. “Why you wanna know?”

“Friendly conversation,” the man said.

“Man, we look like we want a friendly conversation?” Poe asked. “You have a lot of friendly conversations with a man straight through his wife’s torso like this? You know, wherever we from, we got real different manners, is all I’m sayin’.”

“See that’s where I’m suspicious,” the man said. “You must be from someplace with really odd customs. Because in normal places, there’s no way a woman like this would be wasting her time with a pathetic scrap of a drunk bum like you.”

“We all got our good features an’ our bad features,” Poe said.

“I don’t see how a pipsqueak cripple like you could possibly keep a woman like this satisfied,” the man said.

Poe laughed. “That’s ‘cuz you got no imagination, amigo.”

Rey shot to her feet. “Back off,” she said.

Poe had to flail to catch her arm, dragging her back toward him. “Hey,” he said, “hey hey, relax baby, it’s just a friendly dick-swinging competition.”

“Take it as a compliment, sweetie,” the man said, and gave her a good up-and-down.

“I don’t need to be kept satisfied,” Rey said, and she was blazing, incandescent. But she hadn’t shaken Poe’s hand off, which was good because he’d fall over if she did. “My affairs are my own.”

She was radiantly, gorgeously beautiful but she was also attracting attention. “Baby girl,” Poe said, “he ain’t touched you, let him live.”

“Does she fight for your honor a lot?” the man asked.

“Oh,” Poe said, “yeah, _all_ the fuckin’ time. What, you think _I’m_ the muscle here? No way, compadre.”

That was enough that the woman who’d been collecting the glasses approached, hands on her hips. “Is there a problem?”

“There don’t have to be,” Poe said.

The man looked the woman up and down, clearly considering his options. “No, ma’am,” he said.

“I think I might have to ask you to come along with me anyway,” the woman said, “just for a moment. I know a guy who knows about power droids. Maybe you can talk to him and find what you’re looking for without hassling my patrons.” And she took him by the arm in an inexorable grip.

Rey watched them go, then turned to Poe, taking his arm protectively. “Should I not have done that?” she murmured.

“RT-407 was a codeword,” Poe murmured, “but I got a strong feeling he didn’t come by it honestly.”

“Oh,” Rey said, but to her credit, didn’t crane her neck. “Should we run?”

Poe laughed humorlessly, and sat down. “You know I’m not much good for that,” he said.

She sat down in the chair the man had vacated, pulling it closer. Poe’s whiskey glass was nearly empty, and she tipped the rest of the contents of her glass into it. “I’m done drinking,” she said.

He laughed. “Fine,” he said, and knocked back a hefty swallow of it. “Maybe you head back to the ship and I’ll come along once I hear the end of the story.”

Rey shook her head. “I’m not going to leave you alone to get into trouble,” she said, which indicated to him that she thought someone was listening, or why would she talk that way?

“Fair point,” he said. If they had to fight their way out of here, they’d be better off splitting up, except how he couldn’t run. But his read on the situation was that the woman was Resistance and recognized the code word and didn’t figure that guy was really genuinely in the network, which meant she knew there was a leak and was dealing with it. The question, though, was whether she thought they were genuinely uninvolved. And of course, the real question was, how had the guy figured on trying the code word on them? But how to explain any of that to Rey without the bartender overhearing was beyond Poe.

Before he had a chance to try, the woman was already back, behind the bar and talking to the bartender, who was nodding seriously. But neither of them looked over at Poe and Rey. Rey clearly wanted to ask Poe what was going on, and just as clearly knew she couldn’t do it silently either. Not without really spacing out to get into his head.

“He was wrong,” she said finally.

“Oh?” Poe drained the rest of the whiskey from his glass. It went down a lot easier after you’d had a bunch of it.

“You’re not a pipsqueak,” Rey said.

Poe threw his head back and laughed. “You’re really upset that he insulted me, huh?”

“I am,” she said. “I don’t have many friends. I was ready to kill him.”

Poe eyed the bartender, who was watching them in the reflective surface of the brass taps. “Maybe I should take my steadfast, loyal wife home, then, ‘cuz I got a feelin’ he wasn’t the only one who was fixin’ to insult me.”

Rey frowned at him as he stood and held his hand out to her. The woman was still behind the bar, washing the glasses, and she’d started to whistle to herself, nothing recognizable.

“Okay,” Rey said, and stood up, taking his hand and pulling his arm over her shoulders.

The woman was singing to herself, and it didn’t sound like she sang a lot; her voice was rusty and tuneless. But Poe could make out the words, as Rey helped him out the door.

\-- _had wings, and could fly so high_

_I’d fly to the arms of my false true lover_

_and there I’d be content to die_

He paused in the doorway and looked back at her, and she looked up at him, and he knew that she knew-- something. He touched the brim of his hat, and went out the door. He’d sung that song back on base, not all that long ago, and her singing it now-- it was common, it was one of the ones everyone knew, but hearing it specifically right this moment suggested to him that she’d had a direct conversation with someone who’d spoken pretty directly to someone who knew the old codes were compromised. That was what it said to him.

_Finn_ , he thought, but he didn’t know why.

  


__________

  


“I’m going to have to be gone for a little while on a mission,” Finn said. Teeny stared at him blank-faced, but he knew she was getting better now. The blankness was just habit, not actual shock. Karé had taken her under her wing, and they seemed to hang out a lot. Finn wasn’t going to ask for specifics.

There were two more troopers now, recovered from various planets. Teeny had confirmed that she knew both of them, and they’d been selected along with her. One was an older woman, the other a young man; both were in a state similar to how Teeny had initially been. Finn was going to debrief them more aggressively and trust Teeny to make up for it, but he was waiting until the Poe mission got sorted out first. In the meantime, Teeny would be kind and enthusiastic. He liked her a lot.

As for the pilots, Bolt was on the mend, faster than Kalonia had expected, and the other pilot was under sedation recovering from the same stimulant addiction. He’d had a tracker in the same location as Bolt’s. They were apparently standard equipment.

If Finn himself had been equipped with such a tracker, he didn’t remember. But, beyond that, his injury from Kylo Ren’s lightsaber would have destroyed it. It wasn’t worth seriously considering that Ren would have aimed for it on purpose. But it was interesting. Finn hadn’t asked yet whether they’d found any trace of such a thing when treating him. He figured they’d’ve mentioned it by now, if they had.

“Teeny’s in charge,” Bolt said. He had a sense of humor, it turned out. He also had facial expressions. He still had a tendency to be twitchy, but he could focus his eyes for a lot longer now. The issue was going to be excess energy, going forward, Finn thought— Bolt would need a lot of exercise, both physical and mental. The stimulants had only accentuated his natural personality. But for now he was still weak and shaky and recovering from some pretty severe damage, so giving him holovids and gentle debrief sessions with the extremely cooperative Iolo Arana was enough to keep the edge off, for now.

Teeny turned to fix him with a disapproving stare. “Damn right I am,” she said. “I have seniority.”

“You have more than that,” Finn said. “When I come back, we’re going to solve this whole puzzle, of who sent you and why and whether they meant it. That’s all I really want to know.”

Bolt bit his lip, but did not volunteer any information, and after Finn looked at him for a long moment, he raised his eyes and met Finn’s gaze innocently, eyebrows up.

  


__________

  


They cleared Kes pretty much right away to come to the main base. It was on Nellia, which Kes was vaguely familiar with; there was a big spaceport half a day away on a major hyperlane, and he’d worked there a season loading cargo as a young man. Before— well, before Shara, before Poe.

There were some familiar faces there, on the Resistance base. They all seemed to think this was a triumphant return. Organa knew better— and oh, how cruel the years had been to her. She was still beautiful, but there was a brittleness to her he’d never expected, as if pain had burned away the parts of her that weren’t structural.

He’d never disliked her, was the worst part, even as he’d seen how darkness clung to her and soaked through everything she touched. She wasn’t evil, only meant well, but she was in the tide of it, unwittingly serving its ends.

But it didn’t matter— there were no forces for good, in this galaxy. There was only chaos and order, and innumerable factions trying to make order work for them, and nobody was going to win, and everybody was going to lose. Kes was resigned to this, but he also wanted to inflict as much damage as he could on his way out.

The unfamiliar faces here were all young, too young to remember the Rebellion all that well, and many of them were a bit too overawed by him. Maybe it was that they all knew Poe and were seeing him through this filter. It confirmed to Kes that Poe had never one time spoken in any depth about him; nobody knew what to expect. All they knew was Pathfinder. A couple knew him as Yavin’s harbormaster, knew more recent things. But most didn’t. They knew Dameron and thought _hotshot_ and _competent_ and _likable_ and were awkward and sad that he was possibly missing or dead or injured, and didn’t know how to talk to Kes about that. That last thing was possibly the only thing Kes did know how to handle; he just smiled tightly and shrugged, and that was enough for people.

But they were expecting him to be a lot more charming, and he just hadn’t really brought along all that much charm. He was here to fuck shit up.

“You’d be the most useful to us in a logistician kind of position,” Admiral Statura said, looking up at him. Statura wasn’t all that young, and had mentioned that he was from Garel, which was one of the harbors Fronteras had actually had several running battles over, and had no presence in. Despite that, Statura seemed intimately familiar with Kes’s career at Yavin, and had a much clearer idea of who he was dealing with than pretty much any of the rest of these folks.

“Probably,” Kes said, noncommittal, and Statura gave him a narrow look.

“That isn’t what you came here to do, though,” he said.

“Nope,” Kes said. “I mean. I’ll help, but I’m here to shoot people. That’s actually still what I’m best at.”

“I’ll take that into consideration,” Statura said, “but in the meantime, I have a few logistical issues I’d love your insight on.”

“Really,” Kes said. Well. What the hell. There had always been a lot more to war than shooting things.

 

Kes found himself in the quartermaster’s office after a whirlwind tour of the supply depot. Statura had been pulled off to confer with a solemn but incredibly young-looking dark-skinned man in a leather jacket that pinged something in Kes’s memory, but there was no time to consider it and no time to miss his erstwhile tour guide. The quartermaster himself-- themself, he was quickly informed-- was an officious symbiont named Mowa who talked at him for ten solid minutes (including three straight minutes of going on about how they and Poe were such close friends, and Kes thought to himself that perhaps he wasn’t that close with his son as an adult but he knew him well enough to suspect that Poe probably wouldn’t mind setting Mowa on fire and walking away) before he managed to get a word in edgewise.

“That’s a lot better-suited to a smaller-scale operation,” Kes said, when Mowa finally talked themself out and paused, beaming, waiting (finally) for some kind of feedback. “The numbers Statura was telling me,” and he shook his head, grimacing.

“Wait,” Mowa said, looking stunned. “Waaaaait a minute! You have an accent?”

Kes blinked at them. “ _That’s_ your question,” he said. He could not remember the last time he had even noticed his own accent. Probably some Academy function. He’d only really noticed then because Poe had been cringing about it and had seemed to think Kes wouldn’t catch on. It wasn’t a thick accent, it didn’t keep people from understanding him, it was a stupid thing to notice and a rude thing to comment on.

“What kind of accent is that?” Mowa leaned on the counter, appendages fluttering slightly. “Poe doesn’t have any kind of an accent at all!”

“I think that’s deliberate on his part,” Kes said, “and a pretty fundamental thing about him. Wait, are you _seriously_ asking me this?” He looked around, but no one else was in earshot; there were a couple of cute young humanish-looking people of indeterminate gender filling boxes from shelves using checklists on some clunky old datapads, but they were absorbed in chatter with one another and seemed pretty practiced at ignoring the quartermaster.

“Yes,” Mowa said, “I like to know things. Where are you from? I thought you were from Yavin.”

“Yavin 4 was only settled about thirty years ago,” Kes said, “and maybe you don’t know much about humans but I’m older than that. This is an Iberican accent, Mowa, it’s like, the second or third most common human language after Basic, I can’t imagine you haven’t heard one before.” And now he knew for absolute certain that Poe’s relationship with Mowa was probably a pretty stiffly-polite one.

“Reallllly,” Mowa said, drawing it out as if deriving some meaning from this. “Where were you born, though?”

“Alderaan, if you must know,” Kes said. He hadn’t really lived there for any amount of time, but the history of Xicul’s refugees was not something he was prepared to delve into for gossip purposes.

“I had _no idea_ ,” Mowa said. “That is just so fascinating. So Poe’s really, like, Alderaanian! That’s amazing! How do you have an accent and Poe doesn’t?”

“I learned Basic as a second language a lot older and from people who spoke it with accents,” Kes said impatiently, “and also I don’t give a shit because unlike him I’ve had the good sense to spend most of my life among people who don’t care. Listen, amigo, I’m not really here to swap tragic origin stories and tell you basic facts about linguistic education. Either you want my input on your supply system or you don’t, but I have a lot of things to get done.”

Mowa stared at him for a moment, and then their appendages curled coyly inward, and they said, “Of course you do, you have to go save Poe!”

Kes was rapidly reaching the point where he’d be happy to set Mowa on fire and walk away. “I hope I can do more than that,” he said politely.

He managed to escape without committing either arson or mayhem, with the assistance of one of the cute young things, who came over and judiciously interfered. He met up again with Statura in the command center, where the dark-skinned young man was just leaving. “Oh,” Statura said, as the young man paused. “Kes, this is Finn.”

The young man paused in the doorway, considering Kes. He was sturdily-built and strong-jawed, but his cheeks were still rounded with youth. “Good to meet you,” he said, his voice a pleasant baritone, and shook Kes’s hand with a strong grip.

“Finn’s a captain,” Statura said, “but he’s got a phenomenal head for strategy, we’ve got our eye on him for higher command.”

Kes nodded thoughtfully. That leather jacket. It was a pilot’s jacket, and Poe used to wear one just like it, that was why it was familiar. Why would a captain who from his rank insignia was Infantry wear a pilot’s jacket? But the Resistance seemed even less enamored of uniforms than the Rebellion had been.

“I have to run,” Finn said, “but I’m sure I’ll get up to speed when I come back.”

“Trouble?” Statura asked.

“We got another defector,” Finn said.

“Another Stormtrooper?” Statura asked.

Finn shook his head. “Another pilot,” he said. “But you know, there are so many rumors now.” He frowned. “I don’t like it. I need better information. Which is why I’m going myself even though we still have this mission to plan. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Hours, at most. Definitely by tonight. We’ve got to get moving on this.”

He couldn’t be much over twenty, Kes thought, watching the young man leave. That seemed so young to him now, but he supposed he’d been fighting already at that age. Still. “Do you recruit straight out of the creche?” Kes asked, as the door hissed shut.

“No,” Statura said, “but the First Order does. He’s been a soldier for sixteen years.”

Kes turned to look at the closed door. “What?”

“He was a Stormtrooper,” Statura said. “But he had a crisis of conscience, apparently, and when the First Order captured a Resistance pilot, he saw his chance and got the pilot to fly them both out of there on a hijacked TIE fighter.”

“Really,” Kes said, incredulous.

“Oh,” Statura said, smile slipping from his face. “You hadn’t heard that story?”

“When would I have heard it?” Kes asked.

“Poe was the pilot,” Statura said.

“I haven’t spoken to Poe in two years,” Kes said, and there was an answer, he supposed. Poe hadn’t gone around complaining about his out-of-touch bitter shithead of an old man. He was starting to think that little as he knew about his son, the adult, nobody here knew even as much as he did. Did Poe have no close friends?

“Oh,” Statura said.

  
  


It was a long exhausting day, and at the end of it, Kes was shown to a weird little hut and told he could sleep there. He went in the door and stood a moment, eyes adjusting. It smelled like waterproofing spray, and like nobody spent much time in here, but there was something beyond that, something familiar. He noticed the curtain first, as his eyes adjusted. It was a narrow strip of brightly-colored fabric, sewn onto a wider strip of solid machine-woven fabric, and the narrow strip was absolutely something Norasol had woven.

This was Poe’s hut. They’d put him in his maybe-dead son’s room to sleep.

It was about par for the day’s course. Nobody here had any fucking sense of appropriateness. Kes grumbled a quiet profanity, shut the door the rest of the way behind him, and stepped into the room. A pair of boots hung underneath a set of New Republic Navy coveralls hung on a peg on the wall, adorned with a DAMERON nametape. A flight helmet on a shelf, just like the old kind that Shara had worn. This one might even be one of her old ones, it had Rebellion markings on it. Kes closed his eyes, and shuffled inward a little, taking in a breath and steeling himself. He couldn’t sleep here, not like this. Not if they weren’t going to let him go kill people right away.

As he moved, something beeped, and he blinked. Over by the wall, something lit up: a droid, maybe a small housedroid?

No, it was an astromech droid.

Kes stood staring down at the little astromech droid for a moment as it rolled out from the wall, booting up and looking at him. He remembered this little guy. They’d given it to Poe, chosen out of all the cadets in his year and the year above, because it was an experimental prototype and Poe had demonstrated exceptional ability at programming AIs. Kes remembered being proud of his little egg-head nerd boy for that, and simultaneously worried that it would get him picked on.

Poe had certainly gotten picked on, a lot, over the course of his growing years, and he had never one time come to Kes about it. Sometimes Kes found out enough to intervene, but for the most part, he never knew for sure, just watched the alien slyness move behind his son’s face as the boy found ways to survive. Those ways always put more and more layers of distance between the boy and Kes, and Kes had no idea how to get through them without causing more harm than good.

But the little droid had turned out to be good, Kes remembered that much; Poe had been all kinds of proud of it. And he remembered Poe self-consciously explaining that the thing was picky about pronouns. He racked his brain, trying to remember how that had gone, and eventually crouched down to look at the little fellow closer up.

“Hey, BB-8,” he said. “You remember me, buddy?”

It beeped at him. Kes remembered, resignedly, that astromechs did that. “I don’t know how to translate what you’re saying,” he said. “Lo siento mucho, little pal, but they don’t teach ground-pounders how to understand the boopy noises.”

The droid rolled back and forth in place expressively. It spun through a few internal configurations, and then projected a little holorecording.

It was of Kes himself, and Poe, sitting next to each other-- years ago, Poe maybe twenty, twenty-two or so, home on leave from one of his early deployments with the Fleet, hair cropped short. The two of them were doing one of those children’s clapping songs, a very old one from Kes’s own childhood, and they were both obviously tipsy and messing it up, and Poe’s Iberican had regressed a little and he was lisping just a tiny bit on some of his words, like his abuelo had, and they were both laughing so hard they couldn’t finish the rhyme.

“We always fuck that one up,” Holo-Kes said through his laughter as they abandoned the end of it, and picked up a bottle and drank from it, and Poe laughed and laughed and laughed, so hard he was rocking back and forth with it.

Kes sat down heavily on the ground, and breathed hard against a sudden need to cry. He hadn’t known the droid had recorded that. The holo ended, and showed a blinking number. Times the holo had been played: 479.

The droid made a quiet beeping sound, and then projected another holo. It was Poe, looking into the camera. He was sitting on the floor, eye level, and his hair was longer; it was probably recent. He looked a little like he had the last time Kes had seen him, just after he defected to the Resistance. Poe was in a rumpled flight suit, unzipped with the sleeves wrapped around his waist, and a black t-shirt, and looked exhausted. He had a bottle of beer cradled in his hands. The knuckles of one hand were skinned, freshly scabbed-over.

“So I was thinking oh, hey, I should send a holo to my Papa,” Poe said, looking into the recorder. “And then I remembered that I don’t do that anymore. So I guess. I’m not. Recording a holo to my Papa.” He looked miserable, and deflated, and there was a brittleness to the way he was turning the beer bottle in his hands. His expression kept changing in tiny increments, like maybe he was struggling with it.

“So this is me having the awkward realization that I really have nobody in my life to send a holo to,” Poe said, looking down at his hands. “I mean. I could find some friends from school or something, but what do you say?” He scraped at the edge of the bottle’s label with his fingernail. “Hey man, long time no see, I’m a traitor now, but you know the war never actually ended so, really none of it means anything and we’ll never see peace in our lives.” He shrugged, still not looking up. He looked so tired, so worn-down, so hurt.

“I’m lucky,” Poe went on in a moment. “I know that. I’m lucky. So. I was gonna tell you never mind, BB-8, delete this, it’s stupid and embarrassing, but I guess I should keep this as a reminder.” He finally looked up at the camera. “I’m thirty years old and this is the first time I’ve ever really been alone in the world.” He took a slow breath in, and let it out, and it shook a little, audibly. “Some people go their whole lives and never have it as good as I did for so long.”

The holo ended, and another number came up. Total times the video had been played: 128. Clearly, either BB-8 went around showing these to people a lot, or Poe watched them repetitively.

“My little boy,” Kes said, curling around the pain in his midsection. It hurt to think of Poe considering himself alone in the world. There was no helpful astromech droid to record all the hours Kes had spent staring angrily at the stars off the back porch of the house where he’d raised that kid.

BB-8 beeped again, and showed another holo. It was a dark room, only the recorder’s light providing faint illumination, and Poe was sitting with his back against a wall, and he was crying, curled tight into it. “Papa,” he sobbed, and it went right through Kes, like a laser knife, right through him. “Papa, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do this. She left me and I got through that but now she’s dead and I don’t know what to do. I could live without her, but I don’t know how to live in a universe where she doesn’t exist at all. I don’t know what to do, Papa. I don’t know how to do this.”

Poe sobbed wordlessly, hands clutched over the top of his head, and Kes thought maybe he was dying now, hearing this; he’d thought, when he’d heard about Ranisha getting killed, to reach out and see if Poe was all right, but he’d waited to hear from Poe, had thought he should let the man work out his own feelings first, and he’d just— never sent anything.

How did you reach out across a distance like that? Poe hadn’t even invited him to the goddamn wedding. He’d sent a holo telling Kes about it after the fact. Norasol had just about had a fit, but there was nothing to be done about it. Kes couldn’t leave the harbor for that long, and if he wasn’t invited, what would be the point?

“Papa I miss you,” Poe said, voice hitching a little. He was a dim mass in the bad light, grainy and ill-resolved, the black of his hair the only concrete detail. “Papa I don’t know what to do. The sun keeps coming up and I don’t know how to just-- keep going. I know you did it and I never thought to ask you how.” He sobbed. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“Baby boy,” Kes said out loud, anguished, to nobody.

Poe drew a shuddering breath, and scrubbed his hands across his face and through his hair. “And we lost-- the whole base. Almost all the ground crew. Sixty-eight people. I was-- I was probably forty-five seconds too late getting into the air, I couldn’t get position to stop the bombing run that took them all out. Nothing left but a crater. I shot him down, the pilot that bombed them, but it didn’t do any good. Sixty-eight people, Papa. And she was one of ‘em.” He was staring downward, his face picked out in ghostly outlines by the inadequate light from the ‘corder, hand fisted in his hair, eyes just dark hollows.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, hoarse. “I just-- how do you-- keep going? There wasn’t even a body. Just-- a crater. Sixty-eight people.” Silence stretched out, hissing and crackling with half-heard mechanical noises recorded in the background.

In the holo, BB-8 beeped something, and Poe shuddered. “No,” he said, “No, B, I can’t send it. Just-- delete it or something.” He raised his head, face streaked with tears. “Never mind. Shut it off.” He wiped his face roughly, and reached out, and the holo ended.

Total number of times the video had been played: 1. The astro had been saving it for Kes, there was no doubt of that.

“You win, little droid,” Kes said, shoving the heels of his hands into his eyes to stop crying. “You win. I was wrong. I was wrong the whole time. And now it’s too fucking late.”

BB-8 regarded him intensely, almost human in its regard, and Kes scrubbed at his face. “Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?”

The droid considered it, spun in place, and beeped quietly, then nudged itself against Kes’s shoulder. Kes put his arms around it, for want of anything more sensible to do. It whirred in what sounded like satisfaction.

The hut door opening startled Kes badly, and he jerked back across the floor and stared up at the person who had just come in the door and switched on the light.

It was Finn, the baby ex-Stormtrooper, who looked tired and damp and now was frozen in startled shock. But he recovered first, and Kes didn’t miss how his hand came away from the concealed weapon in the back of his belt. “What are you doing here?”

Kes realized that he was kneeling on the floor with tears all down his face. “Talking to this astromech,” he said, climbing to his feet and wiping his face.

BB-8 beeped something, and projected the first holovid again, Poe and Kes and the clapping song. Finn stared at it, then looked at Kes. “You,” he said. “Oh.”

“Poe is my son,” Kes said, realizing that nobody had told this boy anything. It was, again, approximately par. “Are you going to tell me how close you and he were, and then go on and not know anything about his life?”

“I can if you like,” Finn said. He looked sort of grim. It didn’t really make him look any older. “Poe is kind of abnormally good at seeming to tell you everything without ever actually giving you any information. It could have stood him in good stead during interrogations, if he’d ever thought to use the skill, but he only seems to use it on people who are trying to care about him.”

It struck Kes then that the leather jacket the boy was wearing was very likely actually the same one that had been Poe’s. Where else would an altruistic Stormtrooper have picked up a vintage Rebellion flight jacket? And right about then he made the last connection, and he said, “Oh. I guess I could be a lot less surprised about that than I am.”

“I don’t know anything about families,” Finn said. “I never had one, not that I remember. So I only know what a father’s supposed to be like from holodramas.”

“Maybe you know enough to know that shit’s complicated sometimes,” Kes said.

Finn shrugged. “The only time he mentioned you was when he cried in his sleep,” he said. And it wasn’t said cruelly; he was looking at the astromech, and his expression was sad.

It was still too much for Kes. He wrapped his arms around himself and said, hating how small and mean he sounded, “ _He_ left _me_ . It was _his choice_. Everyone is angry with me but he left me.”

“I’m not angry with you,” Finn said. “I don’t know enough about anything to be angry with anyone.” He sounded really, really tired. BB-8 beeped at him, and he shook his head slightly at the droid, which seemed to actually listen to him, and subsided.

“Of course not,” Kes said, deflating. There were a lot of things he wanted to ask this boy, but he just couldn’t muster the words for any of them.

“Do you have a place to sleep?” Finn asked. “We’re leaving early tomorrow, and there’s not going to be a ton of time for sleep once we’re gone.”

“They sent me here to sleep,” Kes said, “which is pretty ridiculous.”

Finn looked around the room. “That is pretty ridiculous,” he said. Something seemed to strike him, and he turned to look directly at Kes for perhaps the first time. His eyes were a deep, soft brown, and maybe he wasn’t so young after all, he had the beginnings of creases across his forehead and under his eyes. “They didn’t make you talk to the quartermaster, did they?”

“Yes,” Kes said.

“Stars,” Finn said, “no one in this place has any goddamn sense. Well, they’ve probably told you what I am, by now, but do you trust me?”

Kes considered him, considered his patient, resigned expression, considered the fact that he was wearing Poe’s jacket and had come alone late at night to Poe’s hut for some unknown reason. “That’s a hell of a question, son,” he said. “But yeah. I do.”

“Then come with me,” Finn said. “And BB-8, you come with me too, you need a recharge before we go.”

  



	2. Good Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new mission, Luke gets the booze out, Rey makes a very important discovery about herself, and Leia figures out where Poe is.  
> BB-8, meanwhile, is really conflicted.  
> Warnings: sexual content (which I know the story's rated for, but I've been light on that lately, so heads-up, I guess I mean it again), and some more graphic descriptions (secondhand) of violence than I feel like I've had so far in here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I blew the deadline for the first time ever, due to a confluence of too many RL things, but I am here only one day late, and I beg your indulgence. *blows kisses* Sorry!

 

They had the former-Republic Middie Cruise cruiser for this mission, loaded with personnel and snubfighters-- a dozen X-wings, all crewed by proven pilots, plus a couple of support craft and  several shuttles; ground troops, shock troops, all hand-picked and prepared. They had a game plan, they had contingencies. They were ready for an all-out battle.

Finn was nervous as hell. This was a bigger mission than the one he’d led to recapture that base. This was high-stakes. And they were trusting him with an important subsection of the whole thing.

The name of the planet was Util. It was a temperate, populated world, Inner Rim, a vacation destination, home to a few light industries and a massive export business of extremely well-designed storage containers. It was largely self-sustaining, politically tended toward moderation, and had some beautiful forests. It wasn’t particularly wealthy but it wasn’t exactly poor in resources.

It was precisely the kind of planet the First Order wanted more of. They had a number under their sway now, in the power vacuum the New Republic’s seat of government being annihilated had given rise to.

There was a healthy Resistance movement on the planet, well-integrated with the planet’s native political factions. But as part of the First Order’s takeover bid, they’d bankrolled a propaganda campaign and had intertwined themselves with one of the major opposition parties. This effort went back years; the Resistance had been fighting with them off and on for a very long time. The destruction of the Republic had driven almost all of the political moderates into alliance with the pro-Resistance factions, but there had been a coup and the pro-Resistance Senator had been captured and imprisoned. The planet’s current governor, another former Senator, was openly pro-First Order, and had swayed most of the planet’s public figures into an at least stated support for his position.

Poe’s mission had been meant to be covert at first, to undermine whatever secret hold the First Order had over a number of previously-neutral politicians. And he had intended to provide some means for the pro-Resistance Senator to be freed from her prison without implicating any of the on-planet covert operators.

Finn wasn’t in charge of this mission, but he was going to be in charge of replacing what Poe had been meant to do. The first component was going to be to find out if Poe was even on the planet; if he was, they were going to rescue him, and Rey, and use her in their bid to counter the First Order. But the delay caused by Poe’s disappearance meant that the First Order may well be on its way now to take open control over the planet. It was expected to be a smooth handover, so potentially they would only send a few officials and a guard escort. But it was also perfectly possible that they’d send a massive force to display their power.

If that was the case, one cruiser was not going to be enough to counter them. But if only a few officials came, then it was a golden opportunity to make some high-profile captures at relatively low risk.

The ship was crowded and tension was high, but morale was good. The cruiser had a high-end hyperspace system that meant they’d be into position in two days, but then they’d have to take shuttles to the planet; the cruiser had to shelter at a distance so as not to precipitate any escalation of the situation. Finn had figured on having Kun fly him in, but at the last minute she’d decided to stay back, and Pava had replaced her, and Arana had stepped in to replace Pava’s original position in one of the X-wings, which Pava had been chattering happily about because it meant his suspension for absence without leave was lifted, or— something? Finn was still not entirely up on the dynamics of the pilots, but Nunb was commanding the squadron that was coming with them on the cruiser, so he was going to leave the personnel up to him.

He wanted to talk to Arana, but couldn’t find him. Arana had a lot of perspective and Finn felt like he needed that, but somehow he just couldn’t seem to locate the man in the chaos of the repurposed ship. Finn had only ever spent time on extremely well-organized ships, most bigger than this one, so he found it a little unnerving to see how haphazard everything was, with odd repurposings and ad-hoc workarounds. But, in the end, everyone seemed to have a general idea of what was going on and who was in charge of what, so he supposed he could live with it.

Finn was thoroughly distracted from his search for Arana by his discovery that BB-8 was not only onboard the ship, but looking for him. He literally tripped over the droid in a crowded hallway, and almost took out a precarious rack of blasters— fortunately, stored with their charge components out, as per his recommendation.

“Do you think you should take me with you when you look for Poe?” BB-8 asked.

Finn hadn’t really considered it. “Well,” he said. “Is there anything for an astromech to do onboard one of those shuttles?” He honestly had no idea what BB-8’s actual job was, most of the time.

“There are a lot of jobs I can do,” BB-8 said, and rolled in an uncertain little circle. “But do you think if I found Poe he would want me back? Or should I show him that I can be good and stay away and not be too loyal to him so that he does not think I need to be reset?”

“Oh, B,” Finn said, and put his hand on the little droid’s upper carapace, above eir sensor array. “B, Poe was wrong to suggest that, and I think he’ll know it. You should come with us if you want to come with us.” He was sure an astromech of BB’s intelligence would be useful, one way or another.

“I don’t want to be reset,” BB-8 said.

“You won’t be,” Finn said. “I promise that.”

“Poe promised too,” BB-8 said, “and then he changed his mind.”

Finn closed his eyes for a moment. “Well,” he said, “you have one up on me, B, he never promised me anything.”

 

________

 

 

Luke Skywalker himself came down the narrow passageway of the ship, and Kes looked down and away, thinking of being invisible, trying to be unobtrusive.

It didn’t work. Luke stopped next to him and touched his arm. “Kes Dameron,” he said. “Leia said you were here. I didn’t quite believe it.”

“Hey,” Kes said, and raised his head. Luke looked old, there was no other way about it-- bearded, grizzled, bags under his eyes, old. “There didn’t seem to be any way to stay out of it any longer.”

Luke snorted. “You don’t have to tell me about that,” he said. “Come sit with me a while? Or did you have somewhere to be?”

Kes glanced down at his datapad. He’d already read the briefing, and he was plenty glad he’d brought his own datapad with his own settings on it; nothing the Resistance had was new enough to take the mods he used so he could fucking read. (There was a fancy word for it, but Kes had gotten pretty good about not thinking about it— letters switched around on him a lot, and moved while he was trying to read them, so it took him forever to puzzle out long passages of text. His datapad had a great program that changed the colors so he could see better, and made the letters stay put long enough for him to understand them.)

They were worse-organized than the Rebellion, and worse-equipped, and that was depressing as fuck.

“Nah,” Kes said, “I got nowhere to be.”

He went with Luke to his quarters. Luke pulled out, of all things, a bottle of some kind of moonshine. Kes laughed, but accepted a cup of it.

They spent a really unexpectedly pleasant hour talking about old times and working their way through the bottle. Luke made Kes cry by talking about Shara, but Kes got his own back when he brought up the time Chewie rescued Ben from a tree and Poe broke his leg.

Predictably enough, it was when they were both crying over Han that Leia showed up, sweeping into the room in urgent alarm for some reason, with an escort of Poe’s little astromech, and the ex-Stormtrooper who was in some capacity courting or fucking Poe, nobody’d been willing to discuss it with Kes and he was just going to have to ask the kid, if it turned out to be relevant.

“What,” Luke said, startled as the door hissed open and all three interlopers more or less poured in, but he instantly looked guilty. “Oh! Oh. I wasn’t shielding well, was I?”

“I thought you were in trouble,” Finn gasped.

“I really thought something terrible had— are you _crying_?” Leia demanded.

“I’m fine,” Luke said, wiping his face. He rummaged through the bag he’d produced the bottle from, came up empty-handed, and handed Leia his cup instead. “We’re drinking. You should have some.”

Leia took the cup. “Where on earth did you get— Oh.” Clearly she recognized the moonshine. She looked at the cup, looked at Luke, looked at Kes, and then tossed back the entire contents of the cup.

Finn looked lost, so Kes handed him his own cup. “Here,” he said, “you may as well join in.”

“I don’t,” Finn said, but then his expression shifted, and he downed the cup too. He handed it back to Kes. “What the hell was that,” he said, shuddering.

Kes shrugged. “I’m not a big drinker,” he said. “But some occasions call for it.” He considered the young man for a moment: he was unreasonably attractive, if baby-faced, with a brightly expressive face and so much force of personality it shone out of his skin at every pore, and was exactly the last sort of person Kes would ever have expected to find under a Stormtrooper helmet.

But, more than that, he’d apparently picked up on Luke’s Force presence. So this boy was clearly more than a pretty face and a probably-decent shot. (Kes had no patience for the inexplicable prevailing myth that Stormtroopers were lousy shots. He had amassed a personal collection of evidence that, properly motivated, they were perfectly fine shots, thanks very much. He did, however, have a pretty thorough grasp of the weak spots in their armor if you were forced into hand-to-hand combat with them. Maybe these new ones were better-trained, but he’d had great success on a memorable occasion with just using a giant wrench to bash a couple of them to death when his blaster had jammed in close enough quarters that it hadn’t mattered. Even if you didn’t get the helmet off, if you hit them hard enough you could rattle their brains inside the bucket, and with repetition that’d do the trick.)

Great. His son had been informally banging a Force-adept prodigy of some kind. Poe had a real taste for the exceptional. Hopefully this would go more smoothly than the time he decided to marry a genius. If asked, Kes would never have guessed it possible for Poe to punch above his weight class in romantic partners, wouldn’t’ve assumed there would _be_ a higher class— certainly, Kes was biased, but even taking paternal favoritism into account, and deducting the necessary points for Poe being completely incorrigible, he was undeniably beautiful and charming and not only reliable and honest but also often the quickest wit in a room— but Poe really had a talent for picking the ones that didn’t really respect him.

Not that Kes really knew anything; he’d barely spoken to Poe as an adult, and most of his knowledge was secondhand and inferred.

“Come on, sit down, both of you,” Luke said, and they all crammed into Luke’s tiny room, Luke and Leia both sitting on the bunk and Kes and Finn nearly shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, passing the bottle around and sharing cups.

“Ohh,” Finn said, catching up after a few lines of conversation, “that all makes a lot more sense now— you fought with them in the Rebellion. Oh. I wondered what that was all about. You were a sergeant?”

“I was,” Kes said. “I was young then, maybe younger than you are now, though I can hardly believe that myself— how old are you?”

Finn shrugged. “Twenty four now, I think?”

“Xacristo,” Kes said, exchanging a look with Luke. Luke was two years younger than he was. “Yes, I was younger than you. Oh my _stars_ you look so young to me. Like you shouldn’t be messed up in all of this.”

“I know,” Leia said, looking hollow-eyed and tired. “We did all that fighting, and here we are.”

“We wanted a better world for our children,” Kes said.

Leia let out a sound that Kes identified with strongly, an anguished laugh that was more like a cry, and Finn looked alarmed and a bit baffled. Ah, then; he didn’t know what had become of Ben Organa.

“I mean,” Kes said, “it could hardly have gone worse.”

“I need to know,” Leia said, sitting forward suddenly and looking at him. “I need to know, Kes, how the hell you managed to fuck things up with Poe.”

Kes held his hand out, and Finn put the cup back into it, looking at Leia wide-eyed. So, Stormtroopers knew about manners, then. Kes poured himself another hefty measure of shine and knocked it back. It didn’t burn anymore, which meant he’d had too much. “Hell of a question to ask me,” he said.

“I mean it,” Leia said. She’d had more to drink than he’d realized. She was pretty small, he recalled suddenly, and probably didn’t drink a lot. “You loved that kid more than anybody ever loved a kid. I always worried, because I thought I loved Ben as much as it was possible for someone to love anyone in the entire world, but somehow, you not only loved Poe more than that, but you made it obvious. I mean, anyone could know it. You did everything right, Kes. No matter what, you loved that kid, even when he was being a little turd, like all kids do.”

“Clearly,” Kes said, “I _didn’t_ do everything right.”

“Who’s Ben?” Finn said, quietly, to Luke, as if anyone could miss something like that.

“Leia and Han’s son,” Luke answered, just as quietly, inflectionless. He was far more subtle than a man who’d had so much to drink should be. “And you may think Leia’s exaggerating, but she’s not. Kes was a really good dad to Poe.”

“All he ever wanted was to get away,” Kes said. He shrugged, handed the cup back to Finn. “He wanted to be like his mama, and his grandpa, and be a pilot, and not be stuck on a planet with his dumb old papa.”

They all considered that. “What, and that was it?” Luke asked.

Kes shrugged. “Well,” he said, “I tried to be a good dad, and support him in what he wanted, and that was fine. I didn’t want him to go away to that stupid Academy, they were a bunch of Basicos who didn’t know their heads from their asses, and I didn’t want him to join the Navy, but what could I do?”

“What would he have done if he didn’t?” Finn asked. He was clearly waiting for the revelation of what had ever happened to Ben Organa, and Kes really didn’t want to be there when he found out. He was probably going to be, the kid was important enough that they weren’t likely to keep him in the dark, but that didn’t mean Kes wanted to witness the revelation, exactly.

Kes shrugged. “There’s work all over,” he said. “I grew up going out to work in various harbors loading freight, and saving my money to come home and work on the family farm during harvest season. I do that now, I work in the local harbor, and I can get enough time off from that to grow some food and livestock, and it’s a pretty good life. Poe thought that was just the worst, though, boring and hard and unglamorous.”

“I,” Finn said, bewildered, “you can just— grow food?” Kes had never really considered it but the kid was probably a spacer, probably hadn’t ever spent any amount of time in one place on a planet.

For some reason he remembered Shara’s face when he’d explained to her that plants didn’t grow in the winter. And then he remembered her delight the first time she’d picked a vegetable off a plant she’d planted herself. She’d been a spacer, through and through, and she’d never really gotten over it, but she’d mostly enjoyed planetside life.

Well. Mostly. She’d never liked the livestock at all. When the chanticlos were tiny fuzzy chicks, she thought they were all right, but once they started getting pinfeathers, on up through the rest of their lives, she’d never liked them at all. And she’d definitely been grossed out by the process that had to take place to convert them from animals to food, though she hadn’t minded eating them at all. Planetsiders had the best food; Shara never got over having a spacer’s palette, tolerant of a great deal of monotony punctuated by highly-processed hot sauce, but she never failed, at least, to appreciate the bounty of food living on Yavin 4 offered.

Kes didn’t fool himself that if she’d survived more than a decade after meeting him she’d’ve still been with him. She’d never really had roots. Five years on Yavin had started to make her itchy. He’d’ve lost her either way, but he’d much rather have had it be the kind where she was still out there somewhere. Maybe she could’ve been there for Poe, maybe she could’ve stopped this from happening.

But it didn’t bear much thinking on.

“It’s not enough to live on,” Kes said, “but it’s a lot of it.” He shrugged. “Poe wanted none of it, though he never said as much.”

“He wanted to be a pilot,” Finn concluded.

“His mother was a pilot, was the thing,” Kes said, “and she was a damn fine pilot, and she flew everything there ever was, from freighters to yachts to snubfighters. And that was fine, because she always came home to me. That was all I ever wanted.”

She always came home to Poe, really. It eventually wouldn’t have been enough. But, again, it didn’t bear thinking about. Kes was good at surviving the loss of things, and he was about done with that kind of lifestyle.

“But if he wanted to fly fighters,” Leia said, “that’s the Navy.”

“It is,” Kes said. “It is. And his abuelo encouraged him. And that was fine, I wouldn’t have been so angry with him for that, except that he—“ The next part was hard to say.

“What?” Finn asked, leaning forward, clearly rapt.

Kes shook his head. “To be at the Academy,” he said, “it wasn’t just that he had to learn the things in class, you know? He had to learn how to be like the others. And the others—“ He shook his head.

“Was it the discipline?” Finn asked.

Kes shook his head again. “No,” he said, “not at all, I was military, that wasn’t— it wasn’t that at all. It was the,” and he broke off, and rubbed the back of his neck. “He just. I shoulda been, I don’t know, more able to deal with it. I was the adult. But I just eventually had just about as much as I could take, and I told Poe that if he was so ashamed of me then he shouldn’t feel himself bound by duty to subject himself to associating with me.”

“Ashamed of you,” Finn said, baffled.

Kes shrugged. It still really stung, was the thing. “Everything about me was so embarrassing to Poe,” he said. “When he was at the Academy, just all of a sudden, everything about me became this awful trial, like I was just doing it to upset him. And, fine, he was a kid, but it never really went away.”

“Everything about you,” Finn said, puzzled. Kes knew enough about the First Order to know they were one of those groups that was really into the monocultural thing, where everyone spoke the same language with the same accent— although they were Outer Rim trash like most of the other gangs, so their higher-ups all knew the trade lingo, and the supposed-monoculture was a carefully-curated illusion— so it was unlikely that a Stormtrooper would know much about intra-galactic race relationships.

“The accent,” Kes said. “The farmer tan. The— so the thing is, I’m dyslexic,” that was the fancy word, he saved it up for times like this, “so that means I’m really slow at reading, mostly, and I usually just make jokes about it if it comes up with new people, to head off misunderstandings. But there’s nothing I can really do about it, I’m a slow reader and there are people who are just going to think I’m stupid no matter what. And it’s not that I don’t speak Basic well and understand it perfectly, but some people, they hear you have an accent, they think you’re definitely stupid. And all of that came together, and to Poe I guess I just was this big dumb ignorant planetsider idiot, and I made him look bad in front of his friends, and he just wanted to get away from me.”

“Oh, Kes,” Leia said softly.

Kes shrugged. “I was a grown-up,” he said, “and my fragile ego should’ve been able to take it, but it was just so damn hard to deal with your kid asking you not to show up to stuff and not to holocall if anyone was around and not to do this or that and I just got real tired of it, so I pulled away. Figured he could come to me if he wanted.”

“And he didn’t,” Luke said.

“He didn’t,” Kes confirmed. “I snapped at him, a time or two, and said if he didn’t want to hear my accent he wasn’t going to hear my voice at all. I guess I could’ve written but I don’t really do much of that. And it just, you know, it just hurt my feelings. And all of this sounds so stupid now. But I heard he got married third-hand, somebody’d heard about it and asked what I thought about it, and I realized around then that I’d fucked it up. But what do you do?” He shook his head.

“It sounded more serious than that,” Leia said.

“Well,” Kes said. “I got pretty bitter. And the first time he talks to me about being married, he’s telling me that he’s getting a divorce. He came home and he was like a different person, and I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t know what he wanted from me. He was a complete stranger. I should have handled it better but I didn’t know what to do, and we argued. And it wasn’t much after that she got killed, and I didn’t know what to do about that, didn’t even know where to send him a holo, figured he’d come to me if there was anything I could do.” He sighed. “I was wrong.”

“So when he joined the Resistance you told him not to involve you in it,” Leia filled in, “and he took that to mean, he shouldn’t ever speak to you again.”

“I was pretty mad,” Kes admitted. “But there’s your answer. That’s how you fuck up. You figure that the best thing to do for your kid is to let them decide what they want, and then you take it personally like an asshole, and then you just never get over yourself, and eventually they go off and get killed because all you really taught them was that they don’t matter.”

“Still better than I did,” Leia said. And a very slight pressure Kes hadn’t really been aware of let go on his mind.

“Did you just use the Force to make me tell you all that?” he demanded, suddenly furious.

“No,” Leia said, blinking at him.

“No,” Luke said, “but that whiskey is pretty good at that precise job.”

“I think that was me,” Finn said, cringing a little. “I wasn’t— I wasn’t making you talk, I was just listening too hard, sort of.”

Kes eyed him. He had been a little surprised to find he had no lingering dislike of Leia, particularly; he’d never disliked her, he’d just had her pushed into a corner of his mind with the stuff he didn’t like to think about. This boy, though. He was probably going to like this boy, more’s the pity. It didn’t do to get too fond of cannon fodder in wartime. And he himself was cannon fodder if anyone was.

“I guess that’s all right, then,” he said.

Finn smiled hesitantly. Then, from his expression clearly knowing exactly what kind of a mess he was delving into, he said, “So is anyone going to tell me what happened to Ben?”

 

 

_____

 

 

 

Poe was so exhausted by the time they got back to the ship that he didn’t seem to notice that Rey was holding him up with the Force. It was really tiring, but she was pretty sure he wouldn’t have made it back if she didn’t. He collapsed into the copilot’s seat and sat there, staring dizzily at nothing, and didn’t seem to care that his scraped hand was dripping blood.

Rey reheated food, and brought him water, and he perked up enough to sit up and drink the water with a grateful expression. “Let me fix your hand,” she said.

He looked at it, and swore absently, or at least she assumed it was a curse, though it was a word she’d never heard before. “It’s fine,” he said, “I was going to hit the fresher in a minute. I’ll clean it out there.”

“You should eat something,” she said, feeling a little like the nagging wife she’d been pretending to be. She didn’t like it, exactly.

“I will,” he said. “Aw, fuck, I got blood all over myself. Great.” He gingerly rolled up one pants leg to look at his knee, which was much more badly-damaged than Rey had realized. “Shit. Oh, hey, this is a planet with cheap water, we can switch back to using water in the fresher. That’ll be nice.”

“Oh,” Rey said, interested. She was used to sonics or spongebaths, and until quite recently had never even encountered the concept of showering oneself in clean drinking water to wash, but had become a fan as soon as she’d encountered the innovation of such a thing as a hot water heater. It turned out that hot water was just about the best thing that could happen to a human body. “Let me go switch it over.”

“Eat first,” he said.

“No, no,” she said, “let me switch the water heater to the solar aux and let it get good and hot, I’ll eat after. I should’ve done that when we landed, but I forgot about the water thing.” At least she’d put the extra solar panels out to refill the depleted power banks, so there’d be plenty of power for it. If only they could make a hyperspace jump off solar power. She’d need a lot more panels and a whole lot more storage capacity for that, though.

When she came back in, he’d emptied the bowl of food she’d left him, and was over by the fresher compartment, peeling his trousers out of the bloody scrapes on his knees. She looked in the pot, and could easily see that he’d just dumped most if not all of the food she’d served him back in there. She wasn’t sure if he really had as poor an appetite as he pretended, or if he was worried there wouldn’t be enough food for her if he ate his fill, but she didn’t know what to say either way.

“It should be all set for you now,” she said, dishing the food she’d reheated for him back up into the bowl and going to sit in the pilot’s seat to eat it herself.

“Thanks,” he said, scrunching up his face and smiling with his voice all genuine in that way he had that made you feel warm like sunshine straight through your whole body. “You’re the best.”

She re-keyed the proximity alarms, listening to the rustling as he got undressed. By courteous habit, she kept herself turned away so as not to watch him disrobe, as he always did for her-- the fresher compartment was just big enough for a person to get into, not really big enough for movement like changing clothes, and there was nowhere else on the ship to have any privacy. But it was tricky not to look, because he kept hissing with pain. Finally she turned and glanced over her shoulder.

He was down to his undershorts, and his shins were black and blue, and she could see bruises on his arms, his chest, his ribs, his thighs, and a big red mark across both sides of his ribs where the crutch had spent the day digging into him. Both knees were a bloody mess, dripping down his shins. She made a noise, involuntarily, and he looked up.

“Oh stars,” she said, “your knees--”

“Looks worse than it is,” he said. “Most of it’s dried blood. It’ll wash off.”

“Let me put bacta on it after, at least,” she said.

“Sure,” he said. He didn’t seem offended that she was looking, but she made herself turn away anyway. She wanted to look at him, not to see the bruises but to see _him_ , and she wasn’t sure why.

 

He stayed in a lot longer than he would have if it were a sonic, and when he came out, he was pink-cheeked and sleepy, hair all flattened down. He sat down on the bunk in nothing but his underwear, and she pulled his legs into her lap and daubed bacta all over the scraped-up areas, and constructed a careful pattern of stick-on bandages to protect the injuries and let the bacta work. His legs were hairy, a lot more so than hers were. She took his hand and did the same, and he looked sleepily up at her.

“Could I comb your hair?” she asked shyly.

He blinked at her. “Okay,” he said, that crease appearing between his eyebrows.

“I like your hair,” she admitted.

“Hm,” he said. When they were out in public, she couldn’t get much of a feel for his mind, but in private like this, especially when he was sleepy, he was a lot more open to her. Trusting in the proximity alarms, she turned her awareness to him, and drank him in. He was tired and shattered, but trying to pull himself together. Even like this, wrecked as he was, his discipline was really good. He sighed, yawned, and climbed unsteadily to his feet, bracing himself easily against the wall. “Lemme put some clothes on,” he said. “Don’t feel right to sit around in my skivvies.” And he stepped into the spare coveralls she’d stolen him from the _Unyielding_.

She pulled up the bed cushions to sit on them, and he slumped over and let her work on his hair with the comb that had been in his toiletry kit. “Poe,” she said quietly.

“Hm,” he said.

“I wasn’t just going to fight that guy to keep up appearances,” she said.

He laughed bitterly. “He wasn’t even wrong, Rey,” he said. “Don’t get offended on my behalf. I was only ever good at one thing and that’s gone. I’m going to have to get used to abandoning my pride.”

And he meant it. He really meant it. It was worse than hearing the other man say it. “I know you don’t know me very well,” Rey said. “Not compared to how well you must know-- lots of people. But-- I mean, I’m a feral desert rat, and I haven’t had a lot of friends, so--”

“You’re not a feral desert rat,” Poe said, and she could feel him pulling himself together to reassure her, and it was too much.

“I’m not fishing for reassurances,” she said. “Stop. It’s all right. My point was-- I don’t know very many people, all right, and there are basically no people I’ve spent as much time with as you. So to me, you’re probably the person I know best in this world after Luke Skywalker, all right?”

He blinked at her, taken aback. “Oh,” he said. Because, surely, to him, this was nothing. Surely, he had a dozen, two dozen people he was closer to, people he’d laughed with and who knew his stories and whose secrets he kept for them.

Like Finn, probably. He probably knew all of Finn’s stories. Rey only knew the one, and it was a good one, but she only knew the one.

“And I’m aware,” she said, “that I’ve hardly been able to get to know a real, representative sample of you, you’ve been injured and sick and terrified the entire time I’ve known you. Don’t think I can’t tell that, Poe Dameron; I’m a feral child but I’m also Force-sensitive and I can see the damage that’s been done to you.”

He was sort of cringing all over at that, under his sincerely polite expression, and it was physically painful. “Fair,” he said, grimacing just a little. “Sorry.” He was expecting her to yell at him to pull himself together, so strongly she could hear the phrase echoing in his awareness-- _pull yourself together, Poe Dameron_ , like he really expected her to say it.

“Stop that,” she said. “My point is, Poe, I really like you, I think you’re amazing, and I wish you’d stop beating yourself up.”

He squinted at her. “It’s sort of hard not to,” he said.

“I’m telling you to _stop_ ,” she said, and she put in enough Force suggestion that he’d feel it, but not enough that he’d have to obey. He was used to that, she’d gathered; it was how Leia often operated, subtle and quiet and really compelling, but never crossing the line.

He picked up on it, and laughed, a quiet bitter little ripple of amusement underlaid unexpectedly with wistfulness. “Don’t tease,” he said, “it’s mean.”

“What,” she said, “you want me to just take your mind over and make you do my wicked bidding?”

“Kind of,” he admitted, and there was an undercurrent of real honesty there that she hadn’t expected.

“Oh,” she said.

He glanced over at her, eyes going a little wide in mortification. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t mean-- that came out creepy.” His face went a little darker-- he was blushing. Oh.

 _Oh_.

She was blushing too. “My bidding wouldn’t be very wicked,” she admitted. “I’m not-- very wicked, as it happens.”

“No,” he said, “you’re certainly not.”

“I could, though,” she said. “Just a little bit.” She slid him a tentative look. “It-- wouldn’t be-- sexy.” She knew about that kind of sex shenanigans, it was something people thought about a lot. She’d done a lot of research into sex. But no matter how much she researched it, she still couldn’t see herself actually _doing_ any of it. She was sort of worried she was missing a bit, or broken, or something.

“No, no,” he said. “It’s not. That’s. I didn’t. I’m not a creep.” He was trying very hard but she could see the little wisp of desperate longing that slipped through his defenses. His discipline was excellent. But she was stronger than that.

“Poe,” she said, and put her hand loosely around the back of his neck, just holding the base of his skull, and he went instantly lax even though she hadn’t put any suggestion in it at all, and sucked in a shuddering breath. His eyes were very, very dark and wide, and were fixed on her with a glazed-over intensity. It was unexpectedly affecting. She stayed like that a moment. “If you tell me to stop,” she said quietly, “I’ll stop. But if you want me to do this I will. I want to.”

His eyelashes fluttered down as he tried and failed to keep his eyes open, his lips parted and his breath moving unevenly between them. “Please,” he said finally, no more than a breath.

The flighty surface of her mind panicked a little-- she had his very soul in her hands like a bug, she could so easily crush him by accident, he’d surrendered so instantly, she didn’t know what to do with this. But below that flighty surface, the rest of her knew.

“Down,” she said quietly but firmly, pulling him down by the barest pressure on his neck, and he lay down with his head in her lap, facing her, and went completely limp and trusting, curled on his side next to her.

His mind was completely open to her; he wanted her to pet his hair, so she did. As soon as her fingers touched his head the last shreds of reservation fled his mind-- he’d still been worrying about being a creep, and she could see now that he’d been worrying all along that she’d be offended that he thought she was attractive, and more tellingly, she could see that he was ashamed of himself for finding her attractive when clearly she was Finn’s true love. _That_ was sort of offensive, actually-- that she belonged somehow to Finn. Maybe she did but that wasn’t for someone else to decide.

But mostly his mind was a painful, injured tangle of damage, of terror and pain and uncertainty, and she combed through it as she combed through his damp curls with her fingers, changing nothing, removing nothing, but rearranging, working out the tangles. “You’re so good,” she said, after a little while, and it sent such a profound thrill through him that she realized she was on to something here.

She bent a little closer, so she could see his face. “Poe,” she murmured, “you’re so good. You’ve been so good, for so long, and you’ve tried so hard.”

He shuddered, and even more tension she hadn’t realized he was still holding went out of his limbs, his neck and his back, his shoulders. His fingers curled loosely in her tunic, where she hadn’t realized he was carefully holding them flat. Not grabbing her, trying to touch her in a way that offered support and warmth without presuming to take anything in return.

It made affection wash up in her, and she let it wash over him too. “You’ve been so brave,” she said. “I see it. I see your fear, I’ve seen how you’ve faced it until it sucked all the hope out of you. You’ve had nothing else to hold onto for so long, but this forlorn belief that if only you were brave enough and strong enough and held absolutely nothing back, maybe you could be good enough.”

He closed his eyes tightly, and a tear leaked out from under his lashes, and ran down his cheek. She kept working on his hair. “You _are_ good, Poe,” she said. “You are good. You’re good enough. I believe you. I see your heart, and it shows me: you’re good enough.”

“I’m not,” he murmured into her leg, fingers going tight in her tunic hem, and the tears came faster. He was ashamed that she was seeing him cry. “I’m _not_ , Rey.”

He was offering up everything bad he’d ever done, in his mind, and she skimmed over it, but he had it all mixed up with bad things that had happened to him, and clearly he believed that the bad things were all things he’d earned. His mother dying when he was a child, a squadmate dying in a training accident, getting injured in the line of duty-- these were tragedies he offered up as if they were transgressions. And the sins he had to offer were relatively trivial, misunderstandings or overstepping himself, making choices with incomplete information, wanting things too badly, taking more than his share, failing to help someone he could have, internalized shame about being teased for his ethnicity making him ashamed of his father for no good reason, ashamed of who he was, undeserving of his father’s conditional love. His wife-- he’d ruined her career, he’d made her follow him to a dangerous posting where she’d gotten killed-- that one was a huge gaping wound of guilt, completely unhealed, a terrible fissure straight across his entire psyche. And on top of that, he’d piled battle deaths-- he had a montage in his mind of all the bombs he’d dropped, all the enemy fighters he’d downed, every strafing run, even if he hadn’t seen anyone die-- violence he’d unleashed, even under orders, still weighed against him, still was his fault.

“I see all of it,” she whispered. “Oh, Poe. I see all of it. And you’re wrong, Poe; none of this is bad. You’re _good_. You’re a _good person_. You’re _good enough_.”

He was trying to deny it, trying to disagree with her, and she just-- pushed his words gently but inexorably back into his mouth, closed his jaw. “Shh,” she whispered. “Shh. No. Shh.”

He sobbed instead, and she wrapped her fingers into his hair and pulled a little to emphasize her point, and she could feel how the little tug of pain in his scalp combined with the pressure on his jaw washed down his body in a sparking wave of sensation, right down the line between pain and pleasure and edging over a little into sexual arousal.

_Oh._

It was the first time she’d really felt sexual arousal and known what it was, and it was-- it was a _revelation_. She tightened her grip and he made a high little sound, almost a whimper. She swallowed hard, and her breathing picked up. _This_ was what all the fuss was about.

He was a little ashamed of it; he knew she knew. “You’re not wrong,” she murmured. “You’re not bad, Poe. You’re _perfect_.”

She’d let go of her control on his jaw; he squirmed a little and said unsteadily, “I’m getting creepy.”

“You’re not,” she said, maintaining her tight grip on his hair. She pulled just the tiniest bit harder, and he made a strangled little noise, arching his back a little. She felt it too, going down her spine in a shivery little spasm. She’d felt that sort of thing before, she’d just never-- associated it with sex the way she was now, and it-- well, it made a lot of things make a lot more sense.

“No,” he said, “I-- you said--”

“It’s all right,” she said. She tugged on his hair a little more, then released it and scritched her fingers in through his hair to his scalp. “I’m in charge and if I don’t like it I’ll make it stop, Poe.”

“Are you sure,” he said, clearly struggling to speak.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I understand, and I like it, Poe. All right?”

He made a noise halfway between a sob and a laugh. “Yeah,” he said fervently. “ _Yeah_ it’s all right.”

“Excellent,” she said, and drew her fingers in, catching a handful of his hair and slowly pulling it tight. He shut up and made a good little whimpering noise again, and she pulled until she felt his pleasure centers lighting up again. “Oh, you’re so good,” she purred. “You’re such a good boy. Look at you-- you’d do anything for me, wouldn’t you?”

His eyes were half-open, unseeing, and she tugged at his mind the way she was tugging at his hair-- a solid, sturdy grip, no yanking or shearing, just a smooth steady pull, and he made a fervent sound, arching his back slowly from down by his hips up the middle to between his shoulders before his head tipped back too. “Anything,” he gasped, and it was true; he was completely open to her now, unresisting and unreserved.

It gave her an incredible feeling of power, and an overwhelming desire to take care of him, to make him safe.

She loosened her grip on his hair and went back to petting it, murmuring “Good boy.” She put her other hand on his shoulder, and gently rearranged him so he was lying on his back looking up at her. His eyes were so dark, iris and pupil indistinguishable in this light, and he gazed up at her with his lips parted, breath coming fast.

“Look how beautiful you are,” she said. He was; she’d never particularly admired a man for being a man, before him. She’d been kind of pushing it away, not really wanting to dwell much on just what it was that distracted her so much when he made certain faces. The line between his eyebrows, for one, sometimes, that was really distracting. She put her thumb against the place where it sometimes appeared, where the skin was faintly creased but smooth right now. His eyelashes kept fluttering down, then up, as he watched her unsteadily from unfocused eyes. He looked like he wanted to lose himself to her, but didn’t want to miss anything while he did, and it made her smile to think of it like that. “I’ve got you,” she murmured. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Please,” he whispered, eyes half-shut and unseeing. She dug her fingers through his hair and tightened down a fistful, and he breathed so hard it was almost a whimper. There were tears, still, that had run down his face, and one clung to the lashes of one eye, faintly glittering in the indirect half-light. And she liked it, she really really liked it, the way he was so wide open and helpless. It was completely unlike the times she’d had to go into him with the Force; this wasn’t him unable to resist or avoid it. This was him choosing to give this to her, unreservedly.

She liked it a lot.

“I didn’t know,” she said softly, wondering. “Oh, Poe. I didn’t know it was like this.” She pulled his hair a little tighter and he gasped, and she felt it shiver down her spine as it did his. She moved her other hand down his jaw, cradling his head, then traced her fingers down his throat. She let herself really look at him, look at the way his body wasn’t like hers. His shoulders were broader than hers, his chest wider, and she traced her fingers down to his collarbones, where he had the coveralls unfastened.

She eased her grip on his hair, but tightened her grip on his mind instead, and he really did whimper this time, a soft fervent sound. His hips hitched up a little, against nothing, and she squeezed her legs together and wriggled just a tiny bit, because she knew what he was feeling.

She’d never exactly-- had sex, or anything, exactly, but she had observed over the years that pressure and friction against certain areas felt good in a very particular way. And she was realizing, now, that’s what people felt when they had sex. She’d suspected it for a little while, and her suspicions had mostly been confirmed since she began to use the Force and have more of an idea what lay within people’s thoughts-- but she still hadn’t really truly understood how they connected.

Until now. Now she understood.

“Show me,” she said, bringing her hand back up and curling her fingers around his jaw. “Poe, show me.”

He dragged his eyelids up to look unsteadily at her. “Show you what,” he managed to say; he was almost beyond speaking.

“Show me-- sex,” she said. “What you do-- by yourself. Show me.”

He made a little more of an effort to focus on her, and the crease appeared between his eyebrows, like it did when he was confused or perplexed. “You want me to,” he said, but trailed off.

“I know you’re,” she said, and stopped, trying to figure out what the word for it was. “Aroused,” she tried, and his mouth twitched a little, and for the first time in her life-- no, the second-- she thought about what it would be like to kiss someone.

She’d thought about it with Finn too, but it had been a lot less well-formed a thought. Now it was vivid, looking at the damp pink skin of his mouth, thinking how it would move under hers, thinking of how his breath would catch-- she had an inkling of what the desire was actually about, how intimate a connection it would be.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what to do about it,” she said, “but I want to see you-- I want to know. How it works.” She was aroused too, she realized, and that was why it was so hard to make sentences work normally. She’d never really-- it had only ever been things inside her head that had made her feel this way, and only alone, only when half-asleep, never with anyone else around.

“I, sweetie, I don’t--” Poe said, and she tightened her mental grip on him and he made an affectingly broken little noise. “ _Oh_ ,” he said.

“I lied,” she said, “I said it wouldn’t be sexy, but I didn’t know any better.”

She could feel it, building in him like a kind of desperation. “Okay,” he said, breathless, “I get it,” and she loosened her grip. “I get it,” he repeated, eyes closed.

She slid her knees out from under his head and lay down next to him. “Show me,” she whispered. The pillows she’d collected in the cozy little room she’d rented back on that last planet were strewn a little haphazardly around in the bedding of the ship’s bunk, and she shoved one under her head to hold it up so she could see, shoved another one under his head to replace her knees, and shoved a third between her thighs to keep her propped comfortably on her side, and also to give her some much-needed pressure. It was like a hunger, or an itch, but neither; she’d felt it before, but not directed at something like this.

“I, uh,” he said, a little self-conscious, and she put her hand back in his hair and applied just enough pressure that his eyes crossed and slipped shut. “Okay. Okay.” His hands had been at his sides this whole time, fisted in the blankets; he pried them free, rubbed them down his coveralls, and then brought them up to work the fastener down.

She’d just seen him in his underwear, there was nothing here to surprise her, but she watched raptly as the coveralls parted anyway because everything was in a new context now. “You want me to,” he said, pausing at about his waist.

“Yes,” she said.

He unzipped the coveralls the rest of the way, exposing his undershorts. He ran his hand down the bare skin of his belly, and she watched raptly; she almost wanted to touch him. She wasn’t going to, though. His skin was darker than hers, a rich creamy-gold, darker brown in the creases of his fingers and around his pale pink nail beds, and the hair on his body was coarser and darker than hers, and in more places.

“You’re so beautiful,” she murmured.

“You really,” he said, but his hesitation was more disbelieving than disinterest. She combed her fingers through his hair, and he bit his lip and pushed his undershorts down, lifting his hips.

And there he was. She wasn’t surprised by the hair, she had hair there too, it made sense. And she wasn’t totally surprised by the size and shape of his-- penis, it was a penis, that’s what that was called, she’d seen it in a holo-textbook and she’d also seen her fair share of snippets of holovid pornos, mostly scraps in secret subdirectories on discarded data drives. But enough to know how the thing was supposed to work, in theory.

And she’d sort of thought it would be terrifyingly enormous, but it wasn’t, it was maybe the length of his hand. She couldn’t imagine having an area of her body that would accommodate such a thing, but it wasn’t as unfeasible as it seemed in the porn holos. He had his hand around it, and he moved his hand and she could feel what it felt like, and she ground herself against the cushion a little, through her clothes, breath coming harder and faster.

“I get it,” she said breathlessly. “I think I get it.” He blinked unfocusedly at her, and she realized he thought maybe that was a dismissal. “Keep going, I want— let me see you, how you— how you do— it.”

He bit his lip and made a sound low in his throat as he began to move his hand, and she watched in rapt fascination. He brought his other hand down, across his body, touching himself-- she wanted to touch him too, she wasn’t going to this time but maybe someday she would. His skin looked soft. “So pretty,” she whispered, and he tipped his head back a little, baring the long line of his throat, breath coming faster through his open mouth.

His hips hitched up, and he shivered; his hand was moving with practiced sureness, his grip firm, and she was breathing hard too, watching him. His whole body twitched and flexed as he moved into his own grip, and it made sense to her, how that would interact with someone else’s body, how it would look for him to make love to-- someone, maybe her, maybe not, she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted. But she knew she wanted-- she didn’t want him to stop.

The pleasure centers of his mind were all lit up and intensifying, and it was lovely to feel him like this, all alive and vital. And she could smell him now; she was used to the smell of his body, clean or not, in these close quarters, but this was different, this was the smell of his skin and a musky sweet-salt tang of sex. She’d never really smelled it before but it went straight to the part of her instinctive mind that knew about these things, her animal brain.

She was as aroused as she’d ever been in her entire life, and her body was moving instinctively, seeking enough pressure against the cushion-- she could press against his body like that, she thought suddenly, and it was the clearest idea she’d ever had about her actual physical, sexual body with another person’s. It superficially alarmed her, but what that really meant was that her pulse kicked up faster and she made a little moaning noise, which she hadn’t meant to do.

“Rey,” Poe said, ragged and plaintive, like he needed something. He had both hands touching himself now, one down under himself holding his-- of course those had a sexual function. Rey had only ever known them as a vulnerable spot in a fight, but there was literally no other reason for them to be designed so poorly, it just figured-- he was holding them, and his other hand was moving faster on his-- erection, hips rolling, and he looked delicious; she didn’t even entirely understand in what way, but he was so appealing she couldn’t think.

“Yes,” she said, “Poe, oh-- you’re so beautiful, you’re perfect-- show me, show me how you--” His pleasure centers were sparking up now, little shocks of sensation, or maybe those were hers. She’d lost track.

“I’m gonna,” he said, panting, eyes gone distant.

“Yes,” she said, and shuddered; it all came to a peak somewhere between her navel and the base of her skull, and swept out tingling through her limbs, and she gasped and shook through it, and he was making the most affecting little noises. His body shook, and he made a series of shuddering little cries.

She rode it out, gasping, and put her hands in his hair and pulled his head against her shoulder. He rolled over to her, still intermittently shivering, breathing hard. “Rey,” he whispered.

“I’ve got you,” she said, because he sounded shaky. He laughed unsteadily, and wiped his hand awkwardly on his underwear as he pulled it up, then pressed his face back into her shoulder and slung his arm over her. The cushion was between them, squashed down, and they tangled together around it.

She kissed the top of his head, and petted his hair gently, pulling back a little from his mind and hovering over him instead, sheltering him. He pressed mentally against her, clearly not wanting her to leave entirely. “You’re so good,” she murmured. “So good.”

He shivered, and she groped for a blanket, pulled it over both of them, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He was drowsy, drifting, and she nudged herself gently into his mind, working on the steadily-shrinking areas of damage. She could almost see an end to it, could almost see him whole.

He slid off into sleep, pulse matched to hers, and she kissed his forehead and curled herself protectively over him before she fell asleep too.

 

_________________

 

 

“He’s on that planet,” Leia said, fuzzy over the long-distance comm.

“What did you find out?” Finn asked.

“I mean I can see him on that planet,” Leia said.

“You can see him,” Finn said.

“Yes,” Leia said. “I’m sending you coordinates.”

Finn abruptly remembered the conversation they’d had, when she’d told him about being able to see Poe in the Force sometimes, just as he realized that Pava, flying the transport, was looking at him sidelong. “Oh,” Finn said. “Yes. You can see him.” And he could feel his cheeks get hot. Well, that answered something, perhaps, about the relationship Poe and Rey had. Maybe. “Ah, can you tell if Rey is there too?”

“She is,” Leia said, “I think.”

“Got it,” Finn said.

“Good luck,” Leia said.

BB-8 rolled up next to Finn’s elbow and made a quiet questioning noise. “It’s a Force thing,” Finn explained, a little lamely.

“Received transmission,” Pava said. “Oh. That’s-- huh.”

The comm shut off, and Finn looked over at the chart Pava had pulled up. “That’s the location?”

“It’s, like, the smallest and crappiest settlement on the planet,” Pava said. “Also would you care to explain why the General could locate them suddenly and why she couldn’t do that before?”

“No,” Finn said, “I don’t actually think I’d care to explain.” He chewed on his lower lip a moment. “I got it. You drop me off there, and you go hook up with the main lady. You can blend in, I really can’t. You can maintain her cover. Our comms are good planetwide, right?”

“Should be,” Pava said. She consulted the chart. “Best if we’re both in the same quadrant, but it looks like we are. So, no problem.”

“Good,” Finn said. “I’d been thinking we should split up, this makes it easier.”

BB-8 beeped again, quiet and uncertain and wordless. Finn looked down at em. “Oh, BB-8 has a transponder,” Pava said, “ey’d be useful as a locator beacon, if nothing else.”

“It’s up to you, buddy,” Finn said.

BB-8 rolled in place, in clear anguish. “Ey’d also be useful here,” Pava said diplomatically. “If you wanted to stay with me, B, I could use your help analyzing comms traffic.”

BB-8 made a sound that was clearly relief. “I will stay with Pava,” ey said. “And not go find Poe.”

“You’re sure, buddy?” Finn had been so certain the droid would come with him.

“I can be useful here,” BB-8 said.

Finn considered em for a long moment. “If that’s what you want, then, I think that’s a fine choice. If that’s what you really want, though. Let me know if you change your mind.”

Pava zoomed in more. “I think the briefing pointed out that there’s network presence in this town, centered around one of the bars.”

“It did,” Finn said. He pulled up the section that had mentioned it. “I’ll look around.”

“Be careful,” Pava said.

 

 

Finn tried to think logically, as he trudged down the hill into town, about what it meant that Poe and Rey were sleeping together now. How did he feel about this? Logically he should be pleased, he wanted both of them to be happy. And he sort of was, but he was sort of anxious. What if they were so happy together they didn’t have time for him? That would make him so sad. But somehow he couldn’t see either of them shutting him out completely.

Well, Poe might. Poe had been trying to. And the pain of that had been a constant nagging companion for a while now, thinking back; the last time he’d seen Poe’s face, Poe had been looking like someone had shot him in the gut with a blaster, looking around the room after that stupid funny _stupid_ holovid about him, and Finn just couldn’t stand to remember that look on Poe’s face and yet it had pretty much filled his memory nonstop for weeks now.

Supplanted only occasionally by the beseeching look a bloody-faced Poe had given the camera just after being rhyndo’d.

Yeah, thinking about Poe having orgasms with Rey was pretty happy, by comparison, and Finn didn’t really care a whole lot about the implications. He wasn’t going to waste time having any emotions but relief.

 

 

___

 

 

Iolo Arana came to gradually, as if he’d been in a very, very deep sleep. He lay in bed for a moment, eyes closed, trying to orient himself— had he been drunk? Why had he been drunk? He had been dreading something, and he couldn’t remember what. He couldn’t remember how he’d come here. Everything was a context-less blur.

He’d pissed off Organa, that was it, surely— he’d defied her, couldn’t bear to let Kes Dameron down, as he had for so long; he’d been jealous of Poe’s awesome family ever since he’d met them, heartbroken for all of them when Poe had confessed that they were on the outs.

But even as the memory of his situation surfaced (he was on probation for his disobedience, which was less than he deserved— he’d really made a mess of things, even if they’d turned out maybe for the best), he figured out that something was wrong.

There was no reason for him to be so groggy. He hadn’t been drinking. He certainly had no reason to have been drugged, and he recognized the sensation of it— he’d certainly been drugged.

He pried his eyes open in sudden alarm at the realization. Where was he?

He was in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room. He tried to sit up, but he was still too groggy.

A face appeared in his field of view. It was Teeny.

“Don’t be angry,” she said, face blank but hands wringing in clear nervousness. Was she gesturing? She was making one of those gestures he didn’t know at all, but Finn did. “Don’t be angry, we had to do it.”

“Do what?” he said muzzily, blinking in disorientation.

“Your mission,” she said. “We had to make a substitution.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So much for being organized and having a theme. I don't have a song for this chapter, so it's going to get a descriptive-excerpt title instead. It's, uh. deliberate. the second story was all titled that way so I'm, uh, alternating.  
> No, I didn't just give up, that's actually descriptive.


	3. Golden Chain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally. Sorry I had to post this as a placeholder first, but here it is, finally!  
> Golden Chain, in which Teeny and Bolt make their choice, Kare and Arana discover the stakes, Poe learns about making crucial choices while under the distracting influence of endorphins, Kes gets a promotion, Rey makes a discovery, and there's a sort of intense reunion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Needless to say, chapter four will also be delayed, since that's in two days and I have A Lot of writing to do and no electricity to do it with and I'll be spending Wednesday driving back across the state. I will aim for chapter 4 next Saturday, though, and we'll see from there. If nothing else, I do have a bunch of stuff written that's off the main timeline, which I keep meaning to organize and stick up here.

_Two days earlier_

 

“That’s our best shot,” Bolt had said, sitting up in bed and looking out after the departed Resistance pilot. “That mission, that they’re going on.”

He still looked absolutely awful, hollow-faced and pale and drawn. “So how do we get them to take us?” Teeny asked, reaching out and holding him by the wrist. It was a novelty, having bare skin to touch, and she was growing very fond of it. “Finn doesn’t really trust us all the way.”

“He shouldn’t,” Bolt said. “Of course he shouldn’t. But Kun, she’s a fool over you. Maybe we can work on her.”

“She’s not,” Teeny said, feeling her face get hot. “I can’t lie to her and expect her to believe me.”

“She listens to you,” Bolt said, but he was so sick that was almost all he could manage, and they stopped talking, and he dropped into a listless silence with Teeny still holding onto his wrist.

“Everyone talks about how you look like that pilot,” Teeny said after a little while. Bolt’s eyelids fluttered and it took him a couple tries to get them up, but eventually he managed to focus on her.

“The one that’s maybe dead,” Bolt said, his voice barely a whisper. Teeny reached the bottle of water for him and held it to help him drink.

“Mm,” she said. “But you know, I think you look like Arana, a lot. Is it that everyone in the Resistance looks the same?”

“That can’t be it,” Bolt said, “or it wouldn’t mean anything that I look like either of them.” He considered it. “I do look like Arana, though. We’re the same build and wear the same size, and colored almost the same.”

“His nose is different,” Teeny said. “And his eyes.” Color as a point of similarity was so unusual to even consider, coming from a world where you couldn’t normally see anyone’s skin. Teeny always considered resemblance mostly in gait. Bolt and Arana moved similarly, but not similarly enough that she’d confuse them. She wondered whether the mythical Dameron moved like Bolt, or if people here really genuinely didn’t notice stuff like that.

“Well,” Bolt conceded. “He’s not human.”

“No,” Teeny agreed. She considered that. “I feel like we could do something with that.”

“We could,” Bolt said. But someone was approaching, so they fell silent.

They had their orders, was the thing. But their orders were not specific, and it was pretty clear the mission planners had kind of meant for the pilots at least to confuse matters by being sick. Teeny still wasn’t sure that it was supposed to have worked quite as it did, but she admitted it had kept them from really getting anything done, which was possibly deliberate.

They were supposed to wait for an officer, was the thing, and none had materialized, so they’d started to think maybe they were off the hook. Their explicit instructions really were pretty much to do what they’d done, which was to successfully defect and integrate themselves into the Resistance. But they needed to get word back to the First Order, especially since their officer had apparently not survived.

But they could just… not, was the thing. This was all a lot nicer than they’d expected, and they were all in agreement— well, Teeny and Bolt were, the others weren’t really caught up enough to have opinions— that they kind of liked it here and wanted to stay.

Teeny sat silently, holding Bolt’s wrist, and the door opened, and Finn came in with someone on foot. “This is where I’ve been keeping everyone together for just now,” he was saying to the other person. “More standard procedure would be to isolate defectors, I think, but most of us feel that’s cruel and unnecessary. Since all of the pilots are so sick, we’re keeping everyone together for just now, and once everyone’s recovered we’re going to revisit assignments, help people decide what it is they want.”

Clearly, this was the other Stormtrooper they’d found, and Teeny craned her neck curiously; she hadn’t recognized the designation so she thought maybe this one was from a different ship. She couldn’t get the angle though. But suddenly, Bolt wrapped both of his hands around her hand and grabbed on tightly, and she glanced over; his eyes were wide. He could see the new person.

Teeny stood up, giving up on nonchalance, and froze where she was, staring.

It was Lieutenant Cluitt.

“Oh,” Finn said, concerned, “are you bad again, Bolt?”

“I’m okay,” Bolt said faintly, making himself let go of Teeny’s hand. He was looking at Lieutenant Cluitt. “You picked a name yet?”

“Dara,” she said softly, uncertainly. Teeny wasn’t sure, but she thought that might actually be Lieutenant Cluitt’s real first name. Officers had two names, and childhoods, and educations.

Officers knew what the orders were.

“Dara,” Bolt said. “That’s a nice one. I couldn’t think of one so I just go by my old callsign. Teeny too.”

“I always thought Teeny was a great name,” Dara said, smiling, smiling like a regular person; Teeny was getting better at seeing the differences. Dara had come here disguised as a Stormtrooper. Finn wasn’t stupid. Dara might not know that. But Finn was distracted. He said there was one more Stormtrooper coming, and that was all they’d found so far. Teeny watched him carefully, and he showed Dara around and left without looking in the slightest bit suspicious.

The door closed behind Finn, and Cluitt turned around and stared at them. They stared back.

“What did they do to you, Oh-Two?” Cluitt asked Bolt.

Bolt glanced at Teeny, and Teeny frowned back at him. “You didn’t know?” he asked.

Cluitt shook her head slightly, pinching her eyebrows together a little— the body language of someone who’d never worn so large a helmet that her face had been completely obscured. “Know what?”

“About the stimulant withdrawal,” Bolt said.

“Oh,” Cluitt said, “the medics said, cutting the tabs in half— you got the instructions, right?”

Bolt smiled faintly. “The drug never worked that way,” he said. “If you cut tabs in half you don’t get an effective dose, so you begin to go into potentially-fatal withdrawal symptoms within a few days.”

Cluitt looked like she’d been slapped. “What?”

“PK-9032’s in a coma,” Bolt said. “I had seizures for days. They’re still not sure I’ll survive.”

Cluitt had gone distinctly ashen under her dark skin. “They said it would work to cut the dose in half,” she said, her hands rising in front of her chest absently before faltering and pressing against the lower half of her face, like somebody who never wore a helmet that covered her whole head. “They said— they told me it would be fine.” She held her hands over her cheeks for a moment. “Is anyone dead?”

“Not yet,” Bolt said. He glanced over at Teeny. Teeny made an equivocating gesture with her shoulder posture, but then moved her hand to indicate sincerity: _I think she’s telling the truth._

Bolt nodded. Teeny turned and looked at Cluitt, who hadn’t missed the gesture. Officers didn’t know all the lingo, usually— not the ones natively from the officer caste, anyway— but they knew the obvious stuff, they’d have to be blind idiots not to catch on to some of it.

“Someone has to have known that,” Cluitt said, hands still on her face. “Someone— you think they did that on purpose.”

“Someone has to have known,” Bolt agreed. “Now, what about your tracking device?”

“I told them where it was,” Cluitt said. “My orders weren’t to betray the location of this base.”

“What _were_ your orders, though?” Bolt asked.

Cluitt looked from one of them to the other. “We should probably discuss that, hm?”

 

_____

_Three days later, a day after the departure of the mission to Util_

 

Kare rehearsed what she was going to say a couple times in her head on her way over to what the others had taken to calling Stormtrooper Central, the hut where Finn had been keeping all the First Order defectors. _I’m glad our friendship is progressing so well, Teeny_ , no maybe she needed to use a stronger word than friendship. Hm. _I’m glad our relationship is progressing so well, but I just feel like I need to know more about you_. It felt weird, felt sort of spy-y to put it like that. But Kare was being honest, it really was becoming a personal issue for her. She wasn’t willing to commit herself to any more intimacy if she didn’t understand Teeny’s motivations. Teeny had told them a lot, but there were still some glaring questions, most notably: _what next_.

The fact that it would serve as maybe the most gentle interrogation ever was just a side bonus, or an annoying liability, Kare wasn’t sure which. She’d really been hoping Arana would take the lead on this and get it done, but he’d sent her this weird urgent comm that he had to go on this mission and that he’d been cleared last-minute to go, and she’d agreed to it but it felt weird to her.

She was glad he was cleared. She understood how upset he’d been; he spoke so fondly of Poe’s family that she could understand why he’d done what he’d done, but it had been a terrible idea. Everyone had terrible ideas sometimes, though, was the thing. And at least Arana’s terrible idea hadn’t gotten anybody killed. So far.

She shook the rain off her raincoat’s hood as she reached the door, and knocked gently on the frame. One of the new ones she didn’t know at all yanked the door open, giving her an intense but blank stare. “Hi,” she said, working hard not to show how unnerved she was. “I wanted to talk to Teeny?”

“Uh,” the new guy said, totally blank but something in his posture coming across as him being deeply disconcerted. “You uh.” He’d been here approximately a day, so she supposed it wasn’t surprising that he wasn’t up on social mores, but he seemed even more awkward than the others had been, which was really saying something.

She gestured toward the door. “Let me come in?”

He stepped back out of the way, but an expression of concern tightened his eyebrows, like he thought that was the wrong thing to do but wasn’t sure what the right thing was. Kare stepped in, and saw that the blanket covering across Bolt’s bunk space was drawn, and someone was talking on the other side of it. Teeny was speaking, quietly.

“Oh,” she said. “Is Bolt sick again?”

“Uh,” the new guy said, in an apparent agony of indecision. “No! Uh. Or. Maybe.”

That was an odd answer, and Kare glanced over at him, puzzled, then went and pulled back the curtain.

Teeny and another of the newcomers-- the older woman-- were in there, standing over Bolt’s bed, which was occupied. Bolt was conscious and moving, and as Kare stood there, Bolt lifted his head a little and blinked, struggling to focus on her.

“Kun,” he said, sounding astonished. “Aren’t you supposed to be--”

With shock, Kare suddenly realized that it wasn’t Bolt at all. “Arana,” she gasped. Bolt resembled Poe, but to a lesser extent so did Arana, though the similarity in his case had lessened as Poe had aged. With an oxygen mask on, and expecting to see Bolt, in the dim light in this room many people wouldn’t notice it was Arana instead. They were the same coloring, the same stature, similar hairstyles.

Which meant that in similar confusion, Bolt could totally have gotten onto that carrier in Arana’s place-- uniformed, helmeted-- and if he capitalized on Arana’s famous tendency toward space-sickness on big ships like that, he could keep his face hidden long enough not to be discovered until far far too late.

“Shit,” the new woman said.

“Wait,” Teeny said, throwing herself through the other woman to grab Kare by both of her wrists. “Listen. You wanted to know everything? I know you do. Now’s your chance to know everything.”

Kare realized the new guy had come and was standing directly behind her. Between her and the exit. Fuck. _Fuck_. She hadn’t thought this through at all. She had not taken this nearly as seriously as she should have. Just because Finn was a sincere defector didn’t mean these people were, just because Teeny seemed so genuine.

“If I scream,” Kare said quietly, and paused to swallow, mouth too dry to go on.

“Don’t,” Teeny said, holding both of Kare’s hands. Her face was wide open, terrified, pleading. “Listen to me. You need to help us.”

Arana struggled, and managed to sit up unsteadily. “If you’re here, and I’m here,” he said, muzzy and certainly drugged, “then who’s flying the shuttle?”

“Pava,” Kare said absently. It came out almost a whisper.

“Don’t scream,” the older woman said, looking tired. And it struck Kare then, that the woman had normal facial expressions. She didn’t emote like a Stormtrooper. “Listen. My name is Lieutenant Dara Cluitt. General Hux sent me on this mission, sent all of us. We were chosen because his pet-- Force-thing, that Kylo Ren creature, read our minds, found the ones who were the likeliest to really sympathize with the Resistance.”

“So you weren’t a Stormtrooper,” Kare said.

Cluitt shook her head. “I was an officer,” she said. “I’m the only one here who has lied about anything. The others have been completely honest with you. But if you scream now, if you turn me in now, I’ll say you’re crazy and he’s drugged. And everyone here will back me up.”

“So listen instead,” Teeny said, still holding her hands. “Listen, and say you’ll help us.”

“I don’t really have a choice,” Kare said.

Cluitt leaned in a little bit, gritting her teeth. “Welcome to my world,” she said. “I’ve never had a choice in anything. That’s why I’m here now.”

 

_______

 

Poe woke up and had no idea where he was. He’d been so profoundly asleep he couldn’t remember what it was like to be awake. It was only when he tried to move, and found that Rey was all tangled up in him, that he realized she’d fallen asleep working on his brain-lesions again, and he had to kind of-- it was weird, it felt like prying himself away from her. Or maybe-- as if she had penetrated him and he had to pull her out. Only not at all like that. He still shivered at it, a little.

She was so fast asleep she was basically unconscious, mouth and eyes slightly open, and she didn’t stir as he peeled himself away from her mentally and physically.

It wasn’t until he was sitting on the edge of the bunk looking down at his unzipped coveralls that he really remembered just what they’d been up to. He was too groggy to muster up any ability to feel weird about it. He’d done slightly kinky stuff before, had let various people pull his hair or tie him up or hold him down or whatever. Last night had definitely left all of those previous experiences in the dust, even though it had possibly been the most technically innocent sex he’d ever had-- she hadn’t touched him below, hell, the jaw, he was pretty sure, and he hadn’t touched her at all. He didn’t think she’d even touched herself. But she’d definitely done something to his brain.

Whatever it was, though, he realized as he woke up, he felt fucking _amazing_. He felt really good. He was dizzy, but not anywhere near as badly as he was used to being. He hurt, sure, all his bruises were sore, and his knees, and his knuckles hurt like a motherfucker. But he felt great anyway.

He hadn’t really slept in a long time, and maybe-- well, if that had been it all along he’d kick himself, but he knew that wasn’t it. Still, if he’d hindered his own recovery by refusing to sleep, he’d have no choice but to feel pretty stupid. He got up and put his hand on the wall and made his way to the cockpit with an almost-normal stride. Proximity alarms showed no intruders overnight, nothing in particular to notice. Feeds showed a fairly normal amount of traffic overnight planetwide, which was good-- if the First Order handover really was imminent, there’d be a bump in traffic both coming and going, surely. If anyone knew about it at all. Which didn’t preclude some terrifying sudden takeover, but that wasn’t what their intel had suggested would happen to this planet anyway.

They had the vents open to the outside, and so it smelled nice in here, like the piney woods they were parked in. Poe made himself a cup of caf, half-watching to see if the sounds or scent would wake Rey. It didn’t, so he sat in the pilot’s seat, read through all the various feeds they could collect, and drank his caf. Not much going on, nothing exceptional. He stuck bandages on his knees, and got dressed, expecting the creaky cabinet door to wake Rey, but it didn’t.

He dressed similarly to how he had yesterday, because today’s first stop was that same bar. He might be able to walk better today. He’d really like that. He combed out his hair so it frizzed, then smoothed some conditioning oil through it so it went back more or less to how it had been yesterday, and spent a moment fussing in vain at his ridiculous beard. He wrapped both hands in some of Rey’s arm-wraps, and went and stood next to the bed for a moment. She was still fast asleep.

He could do this without her. Might be safer if he did. He sat down and wrote her a note so she’d see it on the screen when she woke up.

_Went into town, you were out, I didn’t want to wake you  
_ _going back to that pub, i think that woman is a friendly  
_ _i feel a lot better today and i’m okay, i hope you didn’t over-tire yourself  
_ _i won’t stay in town long, i should be back before midday  
_ _if i’m not back by nightfall, take the ship to the main city on this planet and look in the folder on my datapad marked Tooka Holos, there are instructions. Don’t rush off to rescue me, there are reinforcements in the main city and they’ll help you.  
_ _But don’t worry. I’ll be back._

He saved the message, looked back at Rey’s sweet sleeping face, and had to turn away before thinking about her overwhelmed him. The ship’s door opening didn’t wake her, nor did him resetting the proximity alarms and hastily limping off with the crutch before the alarms kicked back on.

It hadn’t been sex, it had been some kind of holy experience, he thought, as he made his laborious way toward town. He was walking so much more easily today. He really felt great. It was like she’d seen everything, all the things he was secretly ashamed of, and had just-- shone a bright light on everything. It was like she’d cleaned out the festering wounds in his mind and put bacta on them and made him heal. He felt like a new person.

 

The sturdy woman who’d been washing glasses was sweeping the sidewalk, which was a prime opportunity for whistling to herself, but there was no hint of a whistle. Poe leaned against the wall a little ways down the street and watched her brisk, efficient movements. She set the broom inside the door, came back out with a sign made of two boards connected with a chain, and set it up on the sidewalk. (It said “Non-Toxic Lunch Specials” on it, in utilitarian calligraphy, with the slightly unnerving subtitle “Safe For Off-Worlders!”)

He started to hum to himself, casually, but loud enough for her to hear.

_Take warning how you court young men  
_ _They’re like the stars on a summer morning  
_ _First they’re here, and then they’re gone._

Her head snapped up and she stared straight ahead for a moment, before slowly turning her head to look at him.

 _If I had known,_ Poe sang out, softly, _before I courted  
_ _I never would have courted none  
_ _I’d’ve kept my heart in a chest of silver  
_ _Fastened down with a golden chain._

“That’s a good song,” she said. “Did you want to come in?”

“Maybe,” Poe said. “Depends who taught _you_ that song.”

“A man who used to wear a lot of white,” the woman said. “Says he mostly wears a leather jacket now.”

“It suits him,” Poe said, struck suddenly with an overwhelming wistfulness: _Finn_. He’d thought as much; Organa hadn’t been in the room when he’d sung that song, and it wasn’t one of his regular rotation. He’d only swapped it in because the rocking the cradle song had gotten so popular after that holovid, and he’d needed a different song to fill that role that wasn’t quite so heavily-loaded with connotations.

“You’d better come in,” the woman said, and Poe glanced over at the lovely streetscape-- this was a pretty planet, a yellow sun and piney woods and pink sunrises-- just in case he was wrong, and this wound up being the last time he’d see the sky. The sun was just risen, burning through the last of the morning fog, over the roofs of the row of prettily-painted buildings in the little town.

“I’d better,” Poe said, and went through the door behind her.

 __________

  

“The General wants to talk to you, Commander Dameron,” a coolly-competent young woman with Alderaanian hair-buns said.

Kes gave her a look. “Wrong Dameron,” he said. “I’m no Commander.”

She glanced down at her datapad, a crease forming between her perfect eyebrows. “Captain,” she corrected herself, and looked up with wide-eyed dismay. “Sorry!”

Kes made a wry face. “It’s okay,” he said, “but I don’t think I’m a Captain either? Unless maybe that’s what she wants to talk to me about.”

“It might be,” the young woman said. “She’s in her quarters, do you need directions?”

Kes raised an eyebrow. That surely wasn’t as suggestive as it sounded, there just were no private conference rooms on this bucket. “No,” he said, “I know where that is,” and at the last moment he caught himself-- _remember how pernicious rumors used to be in the Rebellion, when she was young and pretty, don’t be an idiot, she’s still pretty_ \-- and added, “if she’s near Skywalker?”

“She is,” the young woman said. “Next door.”

Kes nodded. “Then I know,” he said, and took a brief inventory of himself before he set off. He didn’t have much. He didn’t need much. He wasn’t going to his death, yet. _Calm down, Dameron_.

He touched the little doorbell-chime button and waited, and the door hissed open. It was another smallish room, slightly larger than Luke’s, with a tidy bunk covered in a brilliant woven coverlet, and matching floor cushions scattered around for sitting, that testified that she used this room for meetings all the time.

“Dameron,” Leia said, glancing up, then back down at her datapad.

“The woman who told me you were looking for me called me by a surprising array of ranks,” Kes said, stepping in and letting the door hiss shut behind him.

“Captain,” Leia said, looking up and actually looking at him this time. “Captain Dameron.”

“First I’ve heard of it,” Kes said.

She frowned, gaze going inward a moment. “I suppose,” she said. “Well, I suppose that’s part of what I ought to discuss with you.”

“Efficient to get it out of the way,” Kes said. “The lieutenant called me ‘Commander’ first, though, which I believe is the wrong Dameron.”

“Poe’s a Commander, yes,” Leia said. “So he outranks you, but it’d be highly unlikely he’d be in any situation where he’d be giving you orders. Is that likely to be a problem?”

“I would love to have it be possible for it to be a problem,” Kes said, then relented and said, “No, Leia, I’m not concerned about that sort of thing. I know how this works.”

She’d asked him to call her Leia, but he saw it hit her and go through, like a wave at a lakeshore hitting a swimmer who hadn’t planned to get her suit wet yet, and she blinked up at him, some of the veneer of General shed by it. “If anyone can find him, it’d be Finn,” she said. “I know he’s with Rey, and Finn is attuned to Rey pretty well.”

“Finding him is one thing,” Kes said. “Getting him out safe is another. I will bet you real actual trade goods that Poe will refuse to leave his mission, and will drag them into it with him instead of whatever substitute plan you’ve sent that young man in there with.” He’d almost made a crack about worthless Republic credits, but it felt inappropriate in present company. He’d never held much truck with the Republic, he’d just fought to restore it in the grim certainty that however bad it was, the Empire was worse. He hadn’t been as convinced about the First Order, until Hosnia. Now he’d just run out of analytical power and didn’t care; he was here to fuck shit up, now, and he didn’t give a fuck why.

Leia smiled faintly. “Your assessment is accurate,” she said.

“Moreover if there is a possibility of using himself as bait, Poe will do it,” Kes said.

“Come in and sit down,” Leia said, laughing, and for a moment she was the young Princess of Alderaan he remembered from a state visit, nearly his own age, following her mother Breha around in great seriousness while Kes trailed at his own mother Lita’s heels trying to look solemn and deserving of diplomatic recognition. So long ago, so very long ago.

He sat, and melancholy welled up, and he said, in Iberican, “On Alderaan the ister vines would be blooming now.”

Leia looked over sharply at him. “Do you track Xicul’s moon phases too?”

He shook his head slowly, sadly, refusing to be stung by it. “Only Alderaan,” he said. “I was born there, Poe was born there, Norasol still calculates our namedays by Alderaan’s moons.”

She had her datapad clutched tighter to her chest, and the lines beside her mouth were deeply graven. “I kept track of the calendar for a long time,” she said softly, after a silence. “Always did the translation in my head. It’s really winter now, it’s really spring now, it’s really summer now, regardless of where I was and what the weather was doing. But I let go of it.”

“If it weighs you down, let it go,” Kes said, echoing an old Norasol truism that he knew she’d gotten from a long-dead matriarch before her-- she claimed this to be true of almost all her observations, but he had gotten quite good at telling the difference between old wisdom and a Norasol original, even if she sometimes didn’t know the difference. “But if it holds you up, hang onto it. It holds me up, Leia, so I hang onto it.”

She breathed in and let it out slowly. “I don’t have anything left to hold me up,” she said. “There’s only me.”

“Sometimes it’s heavy,” Kes said, “to be the last one, and to feel like I am obligated to remember, because there is no one else to remember it. And if I forget, they’re all gone forever.” He shrugged. “I still have Norasol but she is very old now, Leia.”

“She seems sharp enough to me,” Leia said.

“She is sharp,” Kes said, “but her time is running out. And then there’s only me, and no one after. I have passed on what I can, and there are dozens of children now on Yavin 4, who know all the stories, who know the old ways. A dozen dozens, all ages, who know how to plant and how to harvest, how to do the little rites to make things right with the natural world. But there are things I cannot pass on, and they will disappear when I go.” He shrugged. “But if you can resign yourself to it that is a kind of freedom.”

“Oh,” Leia said suddenly, as if something had struck her. Kes sat up in alarm, thinking she was having a muscle spasm or something. “Oh, Kes! I meant to tell you right away. The Missing. I think we’ve found them.”

The Missing. Kes stared at her. The Missing were-- they were from before his time, even. As Xicul had collapsed and the mining company had forced the inhabitants off the planet, a large group of them had gone missing, and it had been Lita’s deeply-held belief that they had been taken and sold as slaves as part of the final exploitation of the dying planet. No trace of them had ever been found, but some of Lita’s very close kin had been among them. Norasol had subscribed to the belief that they’d been massacred, but Lita had so strongly believed they were alive that acknowledgement of them had been part of her conditions for the diplomatic recognition she’d devoted her life to lobbying for.

That had all been obliterated, of course, when Alderaan was destroyed. But Kes knew the story, knew that some of Xicul’s exiles among the Fronteras network had always kept faithfully searching for the Missing.

“They’d be dead of old age,” Kes said, but that wasn’t true, of course; there had been entire families, children and pregnant women. Lita’s immediate family-- mother, brother, sister. It had always been such an abstraction to him that he’d never even worked out the relationships to himself-- grandmother, uncle, aunt. “They-- how would you know it was them?”

“They’re in First Order territory,” Leia said. “I had my suspicions, but most concretely, there is a small collection of First Order defectors back at the base, and one of them could be Poe’s twin, only-- I mean, he looks even more like you than Poe does. He’s pure Oaxctli, Kes, and twenty-five years old if he’s a day.”

“Nobody’s pure anything,” Kes said, a little reflexively-- he’d had a lot of little and not so little fights with various people over various interpretations of purebred anythings, and was enormously unimpressed with racial purists of any kind. His brain was turning over strangely, though, kind of without purpose, and after another moment kicked out the sentence, “How could _you_ even tell that by looking, though?”

“You don’t think I studied your people?” Leia asked. “Your case was one of the projects I did with my father.” She bit the end of the sentence off. She meant her real father, who had raised her, Bail Organa, not Vader, the revelation of whose place in her ancestry had done her political career such damage.

“Of course you studied my people,” Kes said. He shook his head slightly. “You know I’m not even pure anything.” His father had been some form of indeterminate admixture of ethnicities, himself. Mostly Xicul, but not all Oaxctli.

“I know, I know,” Leia said. “Trust me, Kes. We have genetic samples from this kid. The doc’s working on it. But if you saw his face you’d know what I meant.”

“Has Poe seen him?” Kes asked. It wasn’t that he really didn’t think you could tell by looking, but he was leery about outsiders making those sorts of calls. That way led to a lot of bullshit. But, Kes reflected a little bitterly, Poe hardly counted anymore as _not_ an outsider. He wasn’t among the ones who’d learned any of the old ways from Kes. He’d never been particularly attentive, and he’d openly started avoiding those things once he’d accepted his position at the Academy.

Leia shook her head. “It was-- he turned up after Poe left.”

“Norasol is convinced the Missing were slaughtered,” Kes said. “I don’t think she’d accept your theory.”

“I have more evidence than just one particularly attractive TIE pilot,” Leia said, annoyance showing through. “I can show it to you now if you like, I just haven’t organized the data into a proper presentation yet.”

Kes shook his head. “Send it to Norasol,” he said. “It’s not my concern. I came here to get killed, Leia, I’m not here to hunt down long-lost relatives.” He sighed and sat forward. “Can we talk about the mission at hand?”

She gazed at him impassively for a moment, then pulled over a holopad from the bedside table and turned it on to project-- _fuck_ , a big chunk of text and figures.

“You know I can’t read that,” Kes said, gesturing at it in annoyance. As she turned to look at him in surprise, it struck him that no. No, she wouldn’t know. Han was the one he’d worked more closely with, who’d briefed him, who had known that if you wanted the Sergeant to know what you meant you had to lay it flat or read it out.

From her expression, she was figuring out the exact same thing, but from the other perspective. “Oh,” she said. “Han never-- brought it up. But you said yesterday-- I hadn’t thought of it, Kes, I’m sorry.” She tapped the holopad, set it down. “Come here and look at my datapad, then.”

Kes came and sat next to Leia on her bed, which felt suddenly very intimate, and she was more polite than he was used to from anyone-- highlighting the relevant text and reading it aloud, reviewing it, summarizing, waiting for him to acknowledge before she moved on but not getting impatient.

It was a good plan; they were going to infiltrate the planet and take over major infrastructure points in advance of any First Order appearance, but they were going to be as invisible as possible. It relied heavily on what intelligence they had on the planet, which was more riddled with double agents than Kes was strictly comfortable with, but he did like that the majority of it could be done without any overt action. Just quiet reinforcement.

The main thing would be breaking out the imprisoned opposition leader. Kes was surprised to be asked to lead that one. “You don’t know what I’ve been up to in the thirty years since you last saw me fight,” he said.

“I _do_ know what you’ve been up to,” Leia said.

“Then you know I haven’t done a ton of fighting,” Kes said. “To call me rusty is to understate the matter pretty severely.” He shook his head. “I think making me be a captain’s a bad idea too. I have no training in that kind of command. Sergeant’s a different level, and that’s all the training I got.”

“Captain is on par with what you do in your civilian life,” Leia said. “It’s about the same level of authority. I’m used to this, remember.”

Kes had never thought of it that way. “Oh,” he said. “I guess. Huh.” He considered that a moment, then shook his head. “No, give me one of the infrastructure missions. I can’t be trusted with politicians.”

She tilted her head and looked sidelong up at him. “Do you really think I’m the root of quite _all_ evil?” she asked, and there was real hurt in the question.

Kes gave her a pained frown. “Nobody has ever said you’re the root of evil,” he said. “Leia, your curse is not your fault.”

“What should I have done?” she asked, shaking her head slightly. “What could I even have done differently? Was it my blood? Was it my arrogance? Why should I be the one to blame?”

“Leia,” Kes said, softer. “I said, it wasn’t your fault. You’re not to blame.”

“But I did it,” she said. “I have done all of these things, I have been the center of so much death and destruction and I only ever wanted to do _good_.” Her teeth were gritted by the last word, face taut.

Kes took a steadying breath, held it a moment, let it out slowly. He was so tired, and the last thing he wanted was to delve into this disaster, but it really wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t fair. He looked at her and remembered the little girl standing next to Breha Organa at a formal audience, holding the holocorder, tiny and solemn and resplendent with purpose.

They had been friends once, and with so few of them left now, it was no good trying to keep any distance. He held out his arm. “Come here,” he said. He knew Leia Organa well enough to know that she bent her neck for nobody. He’d seen her distraught twice now since he got here, and that was twice more than he’d wager pretty much anyone else here had seen.

She hesitated, but then leaned against him, and he embraced her. “It isn’t your fault,” he said quietly. “You’ve done your best. There was nothing else you could have done.”

She shivered. “ _Why_ , then,” she said unsteadily. “Is it my-- blood?”

“No,” Kes said. “I don’t know. It’s not for me to know.”

“What do I do?” she asked, and she wasn’t crying but she was breathing hard. “How can it not be my fault? How can there be nothing I can do about it?”

“I don’t know,” Kes said. He held onto her tighter, rubbing his hand across the middle of her back. She was still so small. She’d been tiny, next to Shara, he remembered-- Shara had been tall and willowy, and next to her, Leia had been this little tiny creature, fire and poise and anger, glossy brown hair in a crown.

She still had the crown, but it was silvered. “It’s taken almost everyone,” she said. “What did you do? How did you survive it?”

“Losing Shara, you mean?” Kes asked.

“Any of it,” she said, shaky.

“You live until you can’t,” Kes said. “That’s all.”

Of all things, that made her cry. She sobbed once, and shook, and hung onto him. He closed his eyes, and rested his cheek against her hair. She smelled familiar. Some hair product or other, some faint hint of a floral scent she’d always had. “Is that where you are now?” she asked thickly, sniffling.

“Maybe,” he admitted.

“Kes,” she said, and pulled away from him a little, just enough to look up into his face. Her face was very close to his. He’d forgotten how intense she was, close-up-- well, really, in general, she was kind of overpowering, at any kind of range. Her eyes were dark and fixed on him unnervingly. “Kes Dameron, don’t you dare die for me.”

“I promise nothing,” he said, letting his mouth twist.

She pressed forward and kissed him, suddenly, and he almost pushed her away by sheer reflex, but instead his hands wrapped around her arms and he held her there. Her mouth was soft, and sweet, and he didn’t exactly mean to but he opened his mouth and she kissed him harder.

She pulled back after a long moment. “Oh,” he said, sort of stunned. Part of him was thinking that he wanted to do that again. Part of him was thinking what a terrible idea it was. The tiniest leftover part chimed in and told him how long it was since he’d done anything like that. He just blinked, and finally said, “Oh,” again.

“I’ve wanted to do that a lot of times,” she admitted, after a moment. “But it always seemed like-- a bad idea, for one reason or another.”

He was still holding onto her arms. “I,” he said. Solo had joked about it once, how Leia sometimes talked about Kes like there’d been something between them. Kes had always, always assumed Solo had been kidding.

She considered him. “Should I apologize?” she asked.

“Uh,” he said. There was a vague awareness in his mind that he ought to say something, but he had no idea what to say.

Her mouth twisted, a little wry. “I usually get more of a reaction from that kind of thing,” she said. “Though I admit I don’t do it all that often.”

Kes tried to collect himself, but his whole face was tingling and he wasn’t sure his heart was beating. “Um,” he said.

“Blue for go,” she said, “red for stop?” He blinked, and shook his head slightly, trying to remember how to breathe. “Kes,” she said finally, “how long is it since someone kissed you like that?”

He knew that answer, he always knew, corrected for Yavin 4’s calendar. “Twenty-four years,” he said. And three months. And six days. And she’d kissed him goodbye, a really good kiss like that, and four days later had ceased to exist. Utterly and completely, no body to bury, and a little boy with her eyes to console.

Leia stared at him. “Oh,” it was her turn to say.

“I maybe need a minute to think about that,” he said carefully. There was no little boy anymore. There was nothing anymore.

“Tell me if I should apologize,” she said, “and I will.”

“No,” he said, and finally made himself let go of her arms. “No, don’t apologize.”

“I didn’t really put a lot of planning into that,” she said, twisting her hands together in front of her waist. Her legs were all folded up underneath her. She was still so tiny. “I just. No one touches me. No one calls me my name.”

“Leia,” he said. Fuck it. He put his hand around the back of her neck and leaned in and kissed her again, soft and sweet, and she shivered and opened up for him. She’d been the first person he’d ever imagined doing that to, so many years ago now he wouldn’t begin to be able to tally it. He pulled away, though, after just a moment. “I think,” he said, putting his forehead against hers, “I think I still ought to think about that a little bit. Maybe we need to win this battle before we take that any farther. But I’ll think about it.”

“That’s probably wise,” she said. They sat like that for a moment. Then she said, “I meant it, though. Don’t you dare die for me.”

 __________

 

“We heard you got rhyndo’d,” the Shozer said. His name was Ooks. The woman was Pia.

Poe was standing in the doorway to the back room, hesitating a little. He’d committed, they could do whatever they wanted to him by now, the door to the outside was shut and there’d be no witnesses if he’d miscalculated. But he hesitated anyway.

“You heard right,” he said, and waved the crutch. “I’m not actually drunk.”

“I’ve seen rhyndo before,” Pia said. “It’s usually a lot worse.”

“ _Was_ a lot worse,” Poe said.

“The point of rhyndo is that it doesn’t get better,” Pia said.

Poe shrugged. “I know,” he said. “Turns out the Last Jedi has tricks up his sleeve when it comes to that kind of shit.” He came through the door, shut it behind himself, braced himself on the crutch for the inevitable wave of dizziness from turning to deal with the door.

Pia and Ooks were trading a look as his vision steadied out. “The Last Jedi,” Ooks said.

“Has an apprentice now,” Poe said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Girl. The one pretending to be my wife last night.” He laughed, dry as dust. “Whoever the dude was, giving us shit, he was right, I got nothing to entice a girl like that. I figured his access to that passcode wasn’t legit?”

“He was an infiltrator,” Pia said. “He’s been dealt with.” She and Ooks were still trading looks. “Jedi apprentice, you say?”

 _That’ll make you think twice about selling me_ , Poe thought. “Yeah,” he said. “I figured leaving her to keep watch was smart, since, y’know, I don’t know you, and all. And I know they got a big bounty on me, so I figured I’d hedge my bets. No offense, I’m sure you wouldn’t do anything so mercenary as that, but it still doesn’t hurt to exercise caution. So I didn’t bring her here with me this time.”

“I see,” Pia said. “She’s a Force user, though?”

“Oh yeah,” Poe said. “Moves shit with her mind and all.” He waggled his fingers. “Spooky shit.”

Pia frowned and shook her head at Ooks, who looked like he agreed. Mm-hmm, they’d been figuring on selling him. If Rey’d been here she’d have flipped out. Better to keep her as mysterious and uncaptureable as possible.  “We should check in with the network, then,” she said. “The man last night was an infiltrator.”

“Did you find out how he knew me?” Poe asked.

“Not yet,” Ooks said grimly. “He’s still… in processing.”

“That’s gratifyingly ominous,” Poe said.

______________

 

Rey woke up disoriented. She rolled over. She was in the bunk on the ship. The blanket smelled like Poe’s shampoo. She sighed and stretched and sat up, looking around the ship. She’d been asleep with her head at the wrong end of the bunk, opposite how she usually slept, so she looked the wrong way for the cockpit at first.

She turned and Poe wasn’t in the cockpit.

She climbed to her feet and looked in the fresher, and he wasn’t in there either. He wasn’t in the ship. Panic fluttered in her chest until she saw that he’d left her a note on the heads-up display overlaying the viewscreen.

Oh. He’d gone into town without her. It was-- oh, it was late morning. She’d slept a long time, and she was ravenous. Well, she’d done a lot of work with the Force, that sometimes had that effect.

She dished up more leftovers and ate them cold. They’d have to make something else soon. She wasn’t tired of this yet, maybe he could just make more of this. Maybe she could learn how to make it. It hadn’t looked difficult.

Her hair was still braided, and she looked in the mirror and decided it could stay as it was a bit longer. Her clothes passed the sniff test so she changed her socks and put her boots back on. And then it was nearly midday, and she couldn’t avoid worrying about Poe any longer.

 _Don’t worry_. What an ass. She checked over the dashboard. He’d re-set the perimeter alarms, and they’d logged his departure time as they kicked back on. It had been three hours. That wasn’t… long exactly, it was a twenty-minute walk to town, possibly longer if he was on his own. He’d have to stop and rest more, without her there to support him.

But that was a reasonable amount of time to be gone. She wouldn’t dash out in search of him just yet.

She opened the door and sat in it to look out at the forest, leaving the perimeter alarms on. And then she sat down in the middle of the doorway, and closed her eyes, and opened her mind to meditate.

She’d fallen asleep wrapped up in Poe’s mind, and he’d had to pull himself free; she could remember that now, though she’d been asleep at the time. She followed his energy signature around the ship in memory, noting that he’d been walking well, less dizziness than usual. And he’d left under his own power. She mentally followed his energy signature as far as she could stretch, feeling where he’d been, picking up the impressions that had been left behind as he’d noticed things. He’d been happy, or at least content, and not in a lot of pain, and he’d thought of her with pleasure, she could get that distinct impression.

At the edge of the woods, the energy signatures of other living things had come and gone, blurring the impression; she lost him well before she got to town. Within town, there were hundreds, thousands of life-forms moving around, bustling, living their lives. Poe didn’t stand out, particularly; she’d sort of expected that having his scent so thoroughly she’d be able to pick him out, but she didn’t seem to be able to distinguish anyone in particular.

Or, no, maybe-- someone stood out, a little. Someone gleamed a soft blue, friendly and distinctive and familiar, and she pressed closer. It was-- it wasn’t Poe, surely it wasn’t, but it was so familiar.

It rippled suddenly, aware of her. _Rey?_

 _Finn!_ she realized suddenly. _Finn! What are you doing here?_ The realization was swiftly followed with an understanding that the only way she could see him so clearly was that he was in the Force too, not just existing but using it. She sent him a wordless exclamation of delighted surprise.

 _Apparently I’m sensitive_ , he answered, and his voice was warm and amused.

 _Poe is in town somewhere_ , she said, _have you found him? I just woke up, he left a note--_

 _Haven’t seen him,_ Finn said, _but I knew I’d find you here, Leia was sure of it._

 _The pub_ , she said, _with the blue sign, that’s where Poe said he was going._

 _I saw that one_ , Finn said. _I didn’t go in. I’m not close to it now. Where are you?_

 _Our ship’s parked out in the woods outside town_ , she said, _maybe fifteen-twenty minutes’ walk?_

 _Should I come find you, or go look for Poe?_ Finn asked.

 _I’d better come find you_ , she said. _Go, look for him, I’ll meet you at the pub._

 

She ran the whole way. Out of meditation, she couldn’t easily sense Finn, beyond a vague feeling that he was nearby that might have just been the power of suggestion. But her feet flew, eating up the path, and she only slowed when people out and about on their business started to take note of her and react with alarm, clearly assuming she was running because of some emergency. She dropped to a brisk walk, smiling reassuringly at people. Not far now.

 _Finn,_ she tried, but he couldn’t hear her now. She moved briskly, catching her breath, unfastening the coveralls to let herself cool off a little. The pub had a sign outside and was open. She went in, and there was a human behind the bar, not the same Shozer as last night; the big woman was nowhere to be found. Finn wasn’t there either.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” the bartender asked; she was young, female, friendlier-looking. Nobody was in the main room at the moment, though life hummed around in the other rooms.

“Have you seen a wild-haired man with a beard and a crutch?” Rey asked, gesturing at her own face.

The bartender shook her head, looking puzzled. “No, but I’ve only been here a little while.”

“What about a dark-skinned young man, probably wearing a leather jacket?” Rey asked.

The bartender shook her head again, and she was starting to look like maybe she was putting something together, and Rey remembered belatedly that if this bar was a Resistance stronghold they probably tried to avoid attracting too much notice. She collected herself. “Well,” she said, “I thought they told me to meet them here, but perhaps I was mistaken.”

“It’s hardly a big town,” the bartender said. “Not like there are a lot of pubs to get mixed up with.”

“Maybe I hurried too fast,” Rey said. Poe would have been here hours ago, but if the bartender hadn’t been, she might not know. “I haven’t seen my friend in ages, I got far too excited when he hailed us.” It wasn’t even a lie.

“Looks like you ran all the way here,” the bartender said, laughing, but it seemed friendly.

“I did,” Rey admitted.

“Well,” the bartender said, gesturing to one of the stools, “take a load off, sit down, wait, I’m sure they’ll be right along.”

Rey sat down. “Thank you,” she said. Oh, she had no idea if she was supposed to buy something. Or engage in polite conversation? How did that work? She busied herself fastening her coveralls back up, and focused as quickly as she could. _Finn,_ she tried. _Finn, where are you?_ There was no answer, and she fiddled with the fasteners and closed her eyes in frustration, trying to go deeper.

“There you are,” he said, and she snapped her eyes back open, unsure whether he’d spoken out loud or in her head.

Out loud. Finn was standing in the doorway. “I almost walked right by the place,” he said, grinning widely, and before she’d even really thought about it, Rey had shot to her feet and thrown herself into his arms.

“Finn,” she said, squeezing him, and he was such a familiar physical presence, he was so solid, and he was wearing the jacket. His arms were sturdy and familiar and reliable around her, and she shoved her face right in his neck. “Oh Finn. Oh Finn!”

“I’m so glad to see you again,” he said. “I’m so glad.”

She slid her hand across his back, feeling the seam where she’d repaired the jacket, feeling how sturdy and whole he felt underneath. “And you’re all right,” she said. “Leaving you behind was so hard, Finn! I promised I’d come back but I didn’t know if I was going to be able to.”

“I know, girl,” he said. “I know. Hey,” and he pulled back a little. “Where’s Poe? Is he here?”

“I don’t know,” Rey said. “She said she hadn’t seen him,” and she gestured at the bartender.

The bartender was staring at Finn. “Are you,” she said quietly, and waved her hand, as if trying to encompass all of Finn in a gesture. “The Stormtrooper.”

Finn glanced around the rest of the room, which was empty, then back at her. “Not much point pretending I’m not, is there?” He grinned, his sweet-cocky grin, and Rey was almost dizzy with fondness.

The bartender shook her head. “Then you’re probably here to talk to Pia,” she said, and fiddled with something out of sight under the bar. She leaned forward, then, and lowered her voice. “Is it true the Resistance is going to prevent the First Order taking this planet?”

Finn nodded. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “You can’t let on that you know. But I didn’t come alone.”

A door at the far end of the room opened, and the woman from last night stuck her head out. “Her, I was expecting,” the woman said, “but not him.”

“Look who it is, though,” the bartender said, and the woman looked Finn up and down, and her expression changed.

“Ah,” she said. Rey wondered how people were recognizing Finn. “You’d better come in.”

______

Bolt had never had space sickness in his life. He’d had little opportunity to look up the symptoms. It hadn’t been the sort of thing that you could really get away with having much of, in the First Order; either you got it sorted or you were no good to them and you went-- wherever it was that washouts went. The running joke had always been that you got recycled into protein rations. Bolt had no genuine idea what happened to washouts.

But he’d figured out at least that space sickness involved the eyes, so he could get away with wearing a bandage around his face and peeking out at people and generally groaning a lot. Which was convenient, as his primary disguise issues were his face above the mouth, and his accent, and if he had his eyes (and coincidentally nose) covered, and moaned a lot, nobody had any reason to suspect he wasn’t, in fact, Iolo Arana.

Pava was quite kind to him, and he felt so bad about misleading her that he almost gave the whole thing away at one point when she was solicitously stacking spare rations in the corner of his bunk while he moaned nonsense at her. But a stern self-talking to, silently, in the mirror in the ‘fresher as soon as she left, reminded him why he was here. He wasn’t here for himself. He had a lot of sympathy for Teeny, though; he’d tried to make her lie to Kun, and he was glad now that it hadn’t been necessary.

Fortunately Pava was one of the first deployed off the ship once they arrived at their destination, and everyone else left presumed-Arana alone.

This was their best chance to finish the mission. Cluitt had known details about Util, had known the scheduled handoff date, had known who was on the roster to attend. Hux expected it to be smooth but high-profile, and was coming himself. At their separation date, any more details than that had been yet to be determined, but Cluitt had suspected, given how chummy Hux was lately with the Ren-creature, that they’d both be there.

Bolt wasn’t in any way deluded that a Force user was really going to buy his disguise in any meaningful way. And he knew it wasn’t just that Ren thing that was one-- the General absolutely was too, and the Skywalker person. His only hope was to be low-profile and unnoticeable and not think too hard about anything.

He didn’t really have to fake being sick, in general. He was still pretty fucked-up from the stimulant withdrawal. He wasn’t any kind of expert in telling when someone was lying to him, but he had little doubt that the medics here had been telling the truth. That one lady especially was really super-intensely sincere, and really believed that the First Order had intended him to accidentally poison himself into uselessness shortly after escaping. What that meant, he wasn’t prepared to devote a lot of thought to. Cluitt had been grim about it.

“Confusion serves them best,” she’d said. “Us, we need answers. You’re our best shot at getting them. You _have_ to be up for this, Oh-Two.”

He’d assured her he was. He’d considered refusing, but Cluitt had from the start instantly thrown herself on the other defectors’ collective mercy and had in general made him believe her that she wanted to see this through. It would have been easy, especially with the ‘Troopers, to rely on their insinctive obedience, and Cluitt hadn’t. She’d put it to a vote as soon as they’d had a moment without supervision.

Bolt had never had any kind of choice in anything before. He had no idea how to make one. Teeny had voted to follow Cluitt, so he’d gone along. He didn’t understand the questions the Resistance had asked him, didn’t understand the way people looked at him, didn’t understand what their general had been talking about with his theoretical people. None of it made sense. But this mission, this made sense.

So he was maybe dying, and maybe he wasn’t going to get out the other side of this, maybe he wasn’t ever going to figure out what everybody was talking about. But he had the clearest head he could ever remember having, and he’d gone into this open-eyed. He was going to finish this mission. He was going to get some answers.

They’d been sent here with orders, but what they did with those orders was up to them. That was what Cluitt had said it came down to now. He’d been afraid she wouldn’t be on their level, but she was. What they did now was up to them.

He had to be able to do this.

Fortunately, he was a very good pilot.

 __________________

 

Poe slouched unobtrusively on the bench in the corner as Pia went out to deal with whatever alert had popped up. They’d exchanged a few messages with headquarters, and it sounded like the Resistance had sent somebody to replace Poe, so that was hopeful. But Pia wasn’t letting Poe get directly on the comms, and he was starting to get really itchy to get in touch with Rey again. He was half-worried she’d decided to call his bluff, and he was going to be really sunk if Rey didn’t figure out how to find him. Maybe Rey was powerful but if she didn’t know where they’d put him, how was she going to be able to get him back? He should have talked this out with her, but he just hadn’t thought anything through this morning. He’d been floating on some kind of endorphin high or something, and everything had just seemed so possible.

Ooks scratched the back of his neck. “We weren’t gonna sell ya for the bounty,” Ooks said, and Poe recognized his body language as self-consciousness. “Not-- not _really_.”

“It’s a lot of money,” Poe conceded. “I was tempted, myself.”

“It’s not that,” Ooks said, uncomfortable. “It’s-- high-profile submission to the First Order. We have no hope of fighting them openly. Our only option is to make them think we’re theirs, thoroughly enough that they don’t think to look closer.”

“I think you’ve got better options than that,” Poe said.

“Well,” Ooks said, “ _now_ we think that. We didn’t, before, or we’d never have come up with a plan like that.”

Poe shrugged with his eyebrows, not much impressed. “I get it,” he said, “I do, but you can see how it doesn’t endear you to me.”

The door opened, Pia on her way back probably, and Poe deepened his slouch and general impression of unobtrusiveness. But it was Finn who came through the door, and he was wearing the mended jacket, and Rey was holding his hand and still had her hair braided the way he’d left it.

They looked so good together, exactly as good as Poe had thought they would, and he stared at them, shocked by the sheer force of the longing in his chest, yanking behind his ribs. Stars, he wanted them, he wanted both of them, he wanted them together, he’d never wanted anything like that in his life.

He knew he didn’t make a sound, but Finn whipped around as if he had, and dropped Rey’s hand to throw his arms wide. “Poe!”

“Hey, man,” Poe said weakly, starting to struggle to his feet-- the delight in Finn’s face was just blinding-- and Finn knocked into him, knocked him back down onto the bench, and wrapped around him like a constrictor-animal.

“Poe,” Finn said, sounding almost distraught. “We thought you were dead, Poe.” He enfolded Poe in his arms, and wrapped a hand around the back of Poe’s skull to cradle him like an injured child, except Finn was squeezing Poe so tight if he were injured at all he’d be having a problem.

“So did I,” Poe said, wheezing a little. He struggled to get a breath. “Hey, man, it’s all right. Hey.”

“There was a holovid,” Finn said, and Poe realized with dismay that he was crying. “You had blood on your face and they hurt you and it was awful.”

“It’s okay,” Poe said. “It’s-- Finn-- it’s okay.” Fuck, there _had_ been a holocorder. He’d figured they were just gonna send the vid to the bounty hunters, he hadn’t expected it to get back to the Resistance.

“Oh, stars,” Finn said, mushing his face against Poe’s shoulder-- wiping his face on Poe’s shirt, that was cute-- okay, it _was_ actually cute-- and trying to pull himself together. “And the last thing I ever said to you was a misunderstanding, and the last I ever saw of you was that stupid goddamn holovid, and I just--  we were so sure you were dead, Poe.”

“Turns out I’m harder to kill than that,” Poe said. He wondered if Organa had been really upset. He knew it wasn’t something to ask. He wondered if his family had been notified. Probably not. He hoped not. His father didn’t need to hear about that. It was one thing to be dead to your family in that you had no contact with them, and entirely another to be actually dead, to your family. He was pretty sure Organa wouldn’t have sent his father a message yet, it was probably okay. “Hey. It’s okay. Who sent you here and how’d you know?”

“Organa sent me,” Finn said. “Me and Pava. Pava’s at the capital with the head of the Resistance.”

“We talked to her,” Poe said, frowning. He wriggled a little, and Finn finally let him go, at least enough to breathe. Finn sat back and kept his hands on Poe’s shoulders. “She didn’t mention Pava.”

“Nobody on this planet tells each other anything,” Finn said, and his grin was blinding. He brought his hand up and touched Poe’s face, and Poe remembered he had a beard now, and Finn had never seen him like that. “You look so different! But your eyes look okay.”

“I’m better,” Poe said. “I’m getting there. The beard is a disguise.” Finn tugged on it, and Poe swatted at his hand. “Ow! I don’t mean it’s fake. It’s real, you jerk, I just don’t have it on purpose.” Finn laughed in delight.

“You look so weird,” Finn said. “All right. Enough of that. We have to get out of here.”

Poe frowned at him. “I don’t know why you’re here,” he said, “but I have a mission.”

“My mission was to retrieve you,” Finn said, “and then scout for what we’re really going to do about this planet. You’re relieved, soldier.”

Poe glanced over at Ooks, who looked amused. “That’s a good one,” he said, and Ooks laughed.

“Don’t think it’s gonna work that way, friend,” Ooks said to Finn.

 

_______________

 

_This is the placeholder I posted initially when the chapter was delayed._

Temporary content: A consolation prize, in case anyone wants more Kes Dameron backstory. I wrote this a while ago and edited it recently and it needed a lot less work than chapter 3, so up it goes today.

[Values](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7347367), featuring Kes and Shara's relationship negotiations against the foil of a canon Imperial character's tiny life story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, the teasers on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bomberqueen17) included a BB-8 segment, but that's been pushed off into next week for a bunch of reasons, all of which are good because it means I've finally started to decide on the Resolution of the B-Plot. Now I just have to write, uh, _all of it_. 
> 
> For the curious, I get real busy in the summer because I switch from full-time online sales clerk to part-time-mostly-time working on [this farm](http://www.laughingearth.farm/).  
> Even off the grid I still get comment notifications on my phone and they make my whole day, I promise, even if I can't really respond to them.  
> And I post stuff to Tumblr that I don't always get around to duplicating over here but it's not a marketing strategy or whatever, it's just that typing is hard and organization is harder. If you don't Tumblr don't worry, stuff will make its way over here eventually!


	4. Towards

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slipped a week, but I hope I can get back on schedule for next week. We shall see, though. There are only two chapters left and I realized as I finished this one that I'm going to have to throw out everything I've written from here on out, and rewrite the end starting fresh. BUT, sometimes rewriting is faster than editing. However, I'm in a place with little Internet access and it turns out I rely on the Internet to keep me motivated while writing? So it's hard for me to judge. I'm going to do my absolute best to get back on the Wednesday schedule, but if I don't make it, understand that I won't be that far off it. I'm *extremely* motivated to get this thing done, don't worry.

“Kun?” a voice said at the hut door. It was Tabala Zo, one of the comms officers. “Kun, are you in here?” She sounded annoyed.

Kun was sitting at the foot of the bed as Arana slowly woke up. He was agitated and groggy, but doing his best to keep it under wraps.

Dara looked up, alarmed.

“You didn’t think no one would notice when I didn’t report for my next meeting, did you?” Kun asked softly, sliding to her feet.

“Who is that?” Dara asked, near-silent. Kun had caught on that Dara was really in charge, but Dara looked to Teeny for a lot of support. It was an interesting dynamic, especially given how clearly new to it Teeny was. Nobody had ever looked to Teeny before, for anything.

“Tabala Zo,” Kun said. Dara raised both eyebrows. “Communications. You can’t--”

“I know,” Dara said, then raised her voice. “In here!”

Zo came unwarily in, looking harried, a portable comm in her hand. “Don’t,” Kare blurted, alarmed, as the new guy (Shanks, he was called, because he had long legs) stepped into place behind her to keep her from fleeing.

“Calm down,” Dara said, stepping over and removing the comm unit from Zo’s hand with a deft gesture. Zo, distracted by Shanks, grabbed after it belatedly.

“Hey!” She stopped short, looked around, saw Arana, and gasped.

“It’s not what you think,” Dara said.

“Crap,” Zo said, looking from Arana to Kun. “Ah, crap!”

“It’s all right,” Teeny said, to Dara, “they’re out of comm range, we can come clean.”

“About what,” Zo said, wide-eyed and clearly alarmed.

“We were sent on a mission to infiltrate the Resistance,” Dara said, all in a rush because she clearly understood that Zo was about to start punching people to escape. “General Hux sent us. I think the whole thing was a trap and we were supposed to fail, but I can’t figure out how. So we sent Bolt in place of Arana on the mission to Util because he can confront Hux there.”

“What,” Zo said, and then followed it up instantly with, “Crap, Hux the General? _Hux_ is going to be at Util?”

Clearly Dara hadn’t expected that reaction. “Uh,” she said.  “Well. Yes.”

“Give me that comm,” Zo said, holding out her hand.

“You’ll never get them a message in time,” Dara said.

“I don’t need a message,” Zo said, “I need to send them reinforcements.”

“Just let whatever happens happen,” Teeny said dully; she sounded like her old self, almost robotic. Kun hadn’t thought she’d be so affected by it. “It’s out of our hands, Dara.”

“Yeah,” Shanks said, and took a step back, getting down to his knees and putting his hands on his head. Teeny followed suit, and Dara visibly steeled herself, then handed over the comm.

“I’m sorry,” Dara said to Kun and Arana.

Zo looked at them, looked over at the pair of former Stormtroopers, and then looked back at Kun. “Did they hurt you?” she asked.

Kun shook her head. “We’re fine,” she said. “I’ve only been here a little while.”

“Who’s the senior Intelligence person left on this base?” Zo asked. “I don’t--” She picked up her comm. “Operations,” she said, “I have a situation.”

 

_____

 

Pava sat in the transport, drumming her fingers absently on her leg. “R4,” she said, to her astro, who was plugged into the optional cockpit port, “are you as bored as I am?”

R4 let a string of ellipses move across the text interface. “No,” he said finally. He was very, very literal.

“I am,” BB-8 said, rolling up next to her elbow. “I’m bored as fuck.”

“Since when do you swear?” Pava asked, clutching her hand over her chest in startlement. She’d forgotten ey’d wound up here. Ey must have been in sleep mode in the back of the cabin.

“I ran out of fucks to give,” BB-8 said. “Poe wanted my protocols reset so I did ‘em myself. Now I talk how I want.”

“You can reset your own protocols?” Pava asked, turning to stare at em.

“I _do_ ,” BB-8 beeped, a little savagely, focused on what ey was doing, “what I _want_ ,” and rammed a data exchange extension into the shuttle’s interface port.

“Uh,” Pava said, moderately alarmed. Ey’d brought up a readout of the planet’s air traffic. She’d been staying off the network to be less obtrusive, but she supposed a read-only connection wasn’t exactly conspicuous.

“So let’s see what’s going on,” BB-8 said. “Is anyone coming or what? Can we get historical data off this thing?”

“I don’t know,” Pava said, watching the readout scroll backward.

The squadron of X-Wings had been launching from the cruiser one at a time, and had all been making their way slowly and unobtrusively toward the planet. Kun had spent a while working out routes for them to take so they could maintain radio silence, and Pava had been prepared to fly one, so she knew how the pattern was supposed to be. So, apparently, did BB-8, because ey stopped the scrolling and brought up the flight path of one of the X-Wings. Their signatures were disguised as well as they could be, interference generators on the tips of their s-foils, but if you knew what you were looking at, it was obvious.

“This one’s out of place,” BB-8 said.

Jess blinked, and studied the readout. It had departed on schedule from the cruiser, but had deviated from the carefully-randomized pattern and was on the wrong side of the planet. It was on the same side of the planet as the approach any visiting ships would take if they got off the hyperlane at the usual checkpoint; the Resistance ships were avoiding anything anywhere near that trajectory.

“Whose bird is it?” Jess asked. It wasn’t moving aggressively, it was using the same nonchalant space-junk drift speed as the others. But it wasn’t on course with the others.

BB-8 made a negative sound. Of course it was disguised, it would be impossible to tell which craft it was.

“And just calling it is out of the question,” Jess said. They were all supposed to be on comm silence except for emergencies. And this wasn’t necessarily an emergency, it could just be a confused pilot, or one who’d seen something and wanted to check it out.

“I can ping the astromech,” BB-8 said.

“Is that wise?” Pava asked. “We’re trying not to draw attention to ourselves.”

“Astromechs do that kind of shit all the time,” BB-8 said, and before she could raise another objection, ey’d made a transmission.

“Beep,” she said, a little annoyed.

BB-8 made a wordless little noise, and spun one of eir closure panels around in a dismissive gesture. They waited. “The ping should have come back,” BB-8 said. “Even if it told me to fuck off, it would have told me _something_.”

“What’s that mean?” Pava asked.

“It means that X-wing is flying without an astromech,” BB-8 said.

“A T-85? Is that even possible?” Jess sat forward.

“It’s possible,” BB-8 said, “but you have to be really good.” Ey pulled eir data transfer attachment out of the port, and spun around in place meditatively. “Also you’d better not want to make a terrestrial landing.”

“So that’s definitely suspicious,” Pava said, reaching for the comm switch.

“It is,” BB-8 said.

“I don’t even know how to call it in,” she said, hovering her hand over the comm switch.

“Don’t,” BB-8 said. “Not until we call in anyway. We want to keep transmissions to a minimum. We can observe it from here.”

Jess watched the little dot of the orbiting X-Wing for a moment. “All right,” she said. It could be someone who had orders she wasn’t privy to. She hadn’t been assigned to monitor the traffic, after all.

Just then the comm chimed with a local transmission. It was the local Resistance center’s code, and Pava picked it up, noncommittally reciting the shuttle’s call sign in case it wasn’t really the Resistance.

“Pava,” Poe said, and she switched on the visual in astonishment, sitting forward. Poe leaned in on his end, and the holo of his face lit up.

Pava shrieked a little, astonished at how strange he looked with a beard. “Poe!” she said.

He laughed. “Hi, Jess,” he said, and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes and the shape of his white teeth overpowered the strangeness of the beard, and she unexpectedly burst into tears.

“We thought you were dead,” she said, covering her face in mortification. She hadn’t meant to say that. Why was she crying?

“Oh, hey, hey,” Poe said. “Jess. It’s okay. Hey. I thought I was dead, too, for what it’s worth.”

“Beep is so mad at you,” she said, and looked over to where BB-8 had been sitting, only to realize that the astromech had left. “What— where did you go, BB-8?”

“Fuck off,” BB-8 beeped distantly, from the rear of the cabin. “You can cry over him enough for both of us.”

“Oh,” Jess said. Poe’s expression was hard to read, but as she turned back to him he made a wry face.

“BB-8’s not wrong to be mad at me,” Poe said, “but it’s probably for the best. Astromechs are for pilots. Ey’s going to need to find a new one.”

“But-- you’re not dead,” Jess said.

Poe laughed bitterly. “The picture must not be good enough on this thing,” he said. “But never mind. If you’re here, you must be able to encrypt the relay out to whoever else is here. Finn said you’d brought everyone with you but didn’t elaborate on who-all _everyone_ really included.”

“We brought a cruiser,” Jess said, “so, really, just about everyone.”

  


_____

  


The holo flickered on, and it was Poe, sitting, looking gaunt, wild-haired, and bearded, and after a moment of stunned silence in which Leia glanced over and saw Kes looking shocked, a number of people broke out into applause.

The display on his end would only show Leia, she knew, so she smiled. “Poe,” she said. “It’s wonderful to see you.”

“How many people you got looking over your shoulder?” he asked, but his mouth curved a little, grudgingly; he was popular, and enjoyed being popular, mostly. Clumsily ill-advised informational holovids aside, anyway.

“A lot,” she said. “Which is the subject of this message, how many of us there are. But we have a moment, first, to express how very glad we all are to see that you are not in fact dead.”

“Not dead,” Poe confirmed, smiling and looking down. She could see it, though, could see how unsteady his gaze still was; he could mostly hide it, and many of the observers would not be aware of it, but she could see it, and she knew, from Kes’s stricken look, that he could too. “I’m not all the way there, but I’m not dead.”

“We’re all so glad to see it,” Leia said. He looked awful, the more she looked; he clearly hadn’t been eating, and his posture was all screaming tension. He was dressed oddly, and looked downright scrawny. His hands were folded in his lap and she could see that the knuckles of one were bruised and scraped.

“Well,” he said, “thanks. I guess I’m glad not to be dead.” He didn’t look completely convinced of that. There was applause, again, and Leia smiled. “So I have Finn and Rey here with me, and we’ve liased with Pava and the Resistance network here. Sources on the planet indicate that the pro-First Order faction of the government has been hard at work to orchestrate what they believe will be a seamless handover of the planet, but the local Resistance faction has coordinated a massive uprising to prevent the takeover. On-planet, we have no major weaponry but there is considerable popular dissent; it does not appear that most of the population supports the minority government faction.”

“That is what we’ve also been told,” Leia said, but it was a good summary, and well-done, and a good way for Poe to show he was as up to speed as anyone.

“My original mission was to come and help build up the popular dissent into a more structured form, by strategic acts including sabotage,” Poe said, “but I was unavoidably detained, and a replacement couldn’t be sent for a couple of weeks. But we do have reinforcements now, and in my absence the Resistance here was preparing to do it on their own. They had been focusing on maintaining anonymity, to sabotage from underground, but with the prospect of reinforcements, they’re revisiting the idea of an overt struggle. I presume, from what Finn has intimated and the fact that you’re within direct messaging range, that there are indeed considerable reinforcements.”

“Yes,” Leia said. “We’ve had a number of small-to-middling victories over the last several weeks, and it seems that this is an opportunity to pursue a larger one. However, our best bet is to conceal our intentions, and allow the First Order to believe that the handoff will go as smoothly and easily as they had anticipated.”

Poe nodded. “We’re all on the same page,” he said. He hesitated a moment, and then said, “We may be able to do even better. As is common knowledge by now, surely, there’s a large bounty on my head. What I didn’t realize is that apparently I have a tracking device, somewhere on or about my person. The First Order knows I’m on this planet and will probably send someone high-ranking to personally collect me.”

“You propose to use yourself as bait,” Leia said.

“I have no choice but to use myself as bait,” Poe countered. “I don’t know where the device is. I’ve been swept twice. There’s nothing obvious. But we keep picking up chatter about my whereabouts, and the chatter is all correct. They know where I am.”

“So you’re in danger,” Leia said.

“Well,” Poe said. “The whole planet is in danger. But on the upside, it doesn’t seem to be something your garden-variety bounty hunters can access. No hunters have approached me. It’s all been actual First Order operatives. So-- I mean, I think I’m going to turn myself in to one of our double agents and make out like I’ve been captured, it’s probably best that way. Make out like handing me over is part of the handoff.”

“We had thought to show up during the handoff,” Leia said. “But it may be that they transfer you to First Order custody early on in the process. What then?”

Poe shrugged. “Then what?” he said. “So don’t tell me any specifics of this plan, and they won’t be able to get anything out of me. You have Finn here, on the ground, to actually lead the Resistance forces. Let them have me, for however many hours they’re allowed to think they’ve won.”

“I’d prefer not to do it that way,” Leia said, and being harsh was the only way to out-stubborn him. “I know you’re good at resisting interrogation but I’d rather not chance it. You know you can’t resist a Force interrogation, and we can’t rule it out.”

Poe squinted at her, nearly a flinch. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll try not to actually get captured. But it might be hard to avoid. I was thinking by letting a friendly fake-capture me I’d be better off than if I was fighting off First Order agents nonstop until this whole thing starts up, but suit yourself.”

“Don’t sass me, little boy,” Leia said in Iberican, and Kes snorted audibly. Poe bit back a laugh.

“Little boy,” Poe said, like that was the funniest thing anyone had ever said to him, then switched back to Basic. “Have it your way.”

 

  


Leia found Kes re-watching the holo of Poe, long after everyone else had left. She came up and gently touched his shoulder, remembering his startle reflex, wondering if he was still so oversensitive or if the thirty-odd years had damped that down at all.

He had heard her coming, and shifted his weight slightly, turning just a little toward her as Poe said, in Iberican, “Little boy,” with an amused curl of his mouth. Kes shut the holo off and looked down at her, face scrunched up just a little bit.

“He’s alive,” Leia said.

“Better than that,” Kes said. He had his own datapad with him, and had clearly transferred the holo over onto it. He had a lot of data on it, she noted; there were expansion chips clearly visible where the thing had been cobbled together to hold more stuff. He sighed. “I don’t know if he’ll care that I’m here, but I’m glad at least to have seen him.”

“What else you got on that datapad, soldier?” Leia asked, playful but really curious.

Kes made a funny face. “I mean,” he said. “All kinds of stuff. If I need to read anything I put it on here because I can make it easier on this thing.”

“Ah,” she said.

“And I keep, you know. Things. Since I’m carrying it around anyway.” He poked at it, and pulled up a holopic, slightly blurry. It was Kes himself, and— oh, it was Shara, looking up into the holocorder with a bright but tired grin. And in Kes’s arms was clearly a very new baby Poe, not newborn but a couple of months old at the most.

“Oh,” Leia said, moved.

“That was when I met him,” Kes said. “Norasol took the holo. I didn’t know until after.” In the holo, Kes was so completely focused on the baby that it was perfectly believable he’d had no idea a holo was being taken. He looked thin and tired and bruised, and Leia remembered that Poe had been born on Alderaan and had nearly been obliterated along with it when it was destroyed a matter of weeks later. It was only coincidence that Shara had brought him along when she’d come to join the Alliance at Yavin 4.

An important component of any resistance movement was compartmentalization of information, and Kes wasn’t on the need-to-know tier for this tidbit, but Leia suddenly needed him to know. “There’s a chance that— _he_ ’ll show up for the handoff.”

Kes glanced over at her, holo disappearing, and the way his mouth set, he pretty much instantly knew who she meant. “You know,” he said, and stopped.

“What,” Leia said, crossing her arms over her chest and rubbing her hands against her upper arms.

“I— Finn told me,” Kes said. “About— how Han—“

“Let’s talk in private,” Leia said, because she was going to cry, and that was also a need-to-know thing, and basically nobody needed to know that she could, and did, still cry.

Kes nodded, and followed her to her quarters, solemn and businesslike and still with his long planetsider stride like he’d had as a young man. She knew, she’d followed his career, and knew that he spent most of his days on a space station, but he was the most earthbound person she’d ever known.

“I don’t have to talk about him,” Kes said, as the door hissed shut. He had his datapad in his arms across his chest like he was protecting himself.

“I, _nobody_ will,” Leia said.

“I don’t know anything,” Kes said. “But I know that.” He hesitated. “If I were in Han’s place. If that were— the kind of, of confrontation, I guess, that I was faced with?”

“You mean, if your son was contemplating killing you,” Leia said, a little bitter. “If your son’s mother had badgered you into going after him with no backup or plan or— or _anything_ —“

Kes set the datapad down on the table near the door and came forward, pulling her into his arms. She pressed the side of her face against his chest. He was a few centimeters shorter than Han, and stockier, though that wasn’t saying much. No, she didn’t want to compare them.

“No,” he said. “But. I mean, yes. If my son had turned his back on everything I believed in, and was pursuing something I didn’t understand, and that thing, whatever it was, told him that I had to die?” He shook his head, and she tilted her head back a little so she could see his face. “I would die, then. I would not really be sorry. If that was what he wanted, I would do it.”

“But your son is not--” Leia couldn’t even bring herself to say it.

“Shh,” Kes said. “Leia.”

The tears came, and she held her breath against them, pressing her face into his chest, until the wave subsided. A few tears leaked out, but she had herself partly under control when she let her breath out, and said, “He’s a creature of hate now. I can’t even feel him in the Force the way I used to.”

“I’m sorry, lady,” Kes said. “I can’t lie and say I know how you feel, so I won’t.”

“At least you haven’t tried to tell me that everything happens for a reason,” Leia said. “Or that the Force has a plan, or something.”

“No,” Kes said. “The Force doesn’t tell me shit. I couldn’t say. I doubt there’s a reason, it just sucks. That’s how the world works, shit completely sucks.”

It startled a laugh out of her, slightly watery but still a laugh, and she held on tighter to Kes. Here was a man who’d been faithful to his wife for over two decades after her death, and Leia-- well, Han wasn’t even the last man she’d been with when he was _alive_ . They’d never worked that way. She should leave this poor man alone, keep her cursed self away from him. But _stars_ , she _really_ wanted to sleep with him, in a way she hadn’t wanted anything in a really long time. She always had, and age hadn’t abated it. He was still solid as a rock and smelled of home in a way that defied descriptions.

“You were right about Poe,” she said, “and how he’s determined to use himself as bait. How’d you see that one coming?”

“Well,” Kes said. “There’s a bounty on him, I didn’t make it up. You’re going to let him do it, aren’t you?”

Leia got herself a little more under control, and tipped her head back to look up at him. “I’m still trying to come up with a way not to,” she said.

Kes raised his hand to her cheek, running his thumb along her cheekbone. He started to say something, then shook his head. “I’d better go,” he said, and let go of her.

“Still thinking it over, or have you made your decision?” she asked.

“I’ve made my decision not to make any decisions until this whole clusterfuck is over,” he said, waving one hand toward the outer hull of the ship.

She nodded. “You’re a wise man, Kes Dameron,” she said.

“That might be the first time anybody’s ever told me that,” he laughed.

She shook her head slightly. “You’re one of the most sensible people I know,” she said. “I hope you can hold to that and not get yourself killed.”

Kes shrugged. “No guarantees, lady,” he said. “Sometimes survival’s the overriding concern, sometimes it’s not. You can’t get anything done if you’re not willing to be flexible about that.”

  


______

  


Bolt fidgeted idly with the safety harness holding him into the X-Wing, watching the face of the planet slowly and gently wheel away beneath him. These X-Wings, they were harder to fly than he’d thought-- slow, cumbersome and heavy to maneuver, complicated and unforgiving to navigate. He had to use both hands, his feet, and sometimes eye gestures to keep the thing going where he wanted, and forget firing the guns, he didn’t even know how to turn them on. He was used to being a precise, agile pilot, to having a direct nerve-like connection to his craft, and a constant awareness of every centimeter of its physical shape. With this one, he was lucky if he could keep its attitude and orientation approximately where he wanted it.

He’d flown A-wings and X-wings in simulation. They’d occasionally let the TIE pilots train on sims of other craft, but mostly to make them appreciate their own craft more. The steadier among them sometimes got trained and promoted-- or demoted, depending how you viewed it-- to fly larger or different craft.

Bolt had never been considered for relocation, because he was really good at the TIEs. He’d figured on dying in one. This fucking thing handled more like a freighter. He had a moment to wish there’d been A-Wings on this mission, because he could figure those out. Those had been all right. This thing was a cumbersome nightmare.

At least it could take a couple of hits, but he had the TIE fighter pilot’s ingrained disdain for such things. Shields were the refuge of the mediocre.

Well. Bolt supposed that was a cute way of thinking but it really didn’t apply to him anymore.  

This thing was clearly supposed to have an astromech. He’d never worked with one. He’d thought he’d be all right without one, had managed to dodge getting one because everyone assumed Arana’s astro would get itself installed on its own. He’d snuck down to the craft early, and he really hoped it hadn’t needed any maintenance, because he couldn’t even begin to figure out how that would work. It had survived launch through the cargo bay shield, and wasn’t leaking atmo, and that was the best Bolt could hope for.

Now he just had to wait for the First Order transport to show up, and see what happened.

 

Hopefully, it would be something that didn’t involve him landing this thing. He didn’t think he could. He idly wondered if he could search the open holonet on this thing and find instructions. If anyone was monitoring traffic, surely that would be suspicious: a poorly-disguised free-floating chunk of space junk with someone in it searching for instructions on landing an X-Wing.

The absurdity of it consoled him, a little, as he watched the planet’s intermittent surface from his free cartwheeling.

 

______

  


“We’re the two best suited to keep you safe here,” Rey said, “and that’s that.”

She had one of Poe’s arms under her shoulder, and Finn had the other, and she was holding Poe’s crutch like a walking-stick. She could feel his bruised ribs radiating pain and wouldn’t let him even try to use the crutch. She could also feel Finn’s presence, warm and radiating and confident, and it was making her feel strangely fluttery inside.

“Plus, the three of us, here like this?” Finn grinned across at her. “Such a tempting target. You know they’ll send their best people in.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Poe said. “I’d be so much safer in that senator’s aide’s basement with chains around my neck.”

“You can’t tell me you’d be more comfortable,” Rey said.

“I might be,” Poe said, and she could feel it then: he was conflicted about them. He thought Finn and Rey were a couple, she’d picked up on that before, and he both wanted it to be true and didn’t, because he was afraid they’d both cut him out. And finally Rey could follow the strange inarticulate knot of feelings she’d noticed he had for Finn: he cared for Finn but believed Finn didn’t return the sentiment, and seemed to have confirmation of it.

Curious, Rey poked at Finn, who was receptive enough that he offered her access without hesitation. He had a big tangle of Poe-feelings too, but they weren’t quite so tangled; he mostly was confused. And they’d definitely had sex, and that solidified a floaty, unformed desire that had been curling around in Rey’s middle for a while now: she wanted that, she wanted to see that, she wanted them to be together.

She was pretty new to the idea of thinking of herself and other people in the same context when it came to desire and such. So maybe it was a normal thing that sometimes you were in threes instead of pairs. She didn’t know. She didn’t see why not. It would definitely take some pressure off her, because now she knew Finn liked to have sex, and she had no idea if she’d want to, and it made her unhappy to think of Finn not having sex only because she didn’t want to.

“Poe,” she said. “We need to talk about some things.” She was new enough at relationships that she didn’t expect the visceral jolt of unease that phrase gave him, but it was revealing: he was figuring on the two of them being together and excluding him, and he was trying to hastily erect barricades in his heart to make that not destroy him. The little stab of secondhand pain that gave her was enough to make Rey stumble. “Wait,” she said, catching her balance, and Finn lurched to a stop next to her, too. “Wait. Poe!”

“Stop,” Poe said, teeth gritted, and he wouldn’t make eye contact with her. “Stop-- fucking, _peeking_.”

“I live in your head,” she said, “I can’t help it.” She put her hand on his jaw and stared into his face, and he finally had no choice but to look at her. “I’m not trying to be a jerk, Poe.”

She could feel him pulling himself together, and it was with frayed but intact discipline that he met her gaze. “I’m tired,” he said, “and badly injured, and have no control over any part of my life, and you keep splaying me open and poking through my guts like a bored student in a biology class.”

She glanced over at Finn, who looked dismayed and worried, then back at Poe, who was on-edge and radiating all kinds of pain. “It’ll be all right,” she said, and leaned in. She hadn’t ever done this before but it seemed like the kind of thing you could just pick up as you went along; she fitted her mouth to Poe’s, and kissed him. His mouth was soft, like she’d expected, and moved under hers like she’d thought, but it was still more intense than she’d been prepared for, to feel his breath and how alive he was and how warm and damp his mouth was, and Finn’s awareness shot a spike of arousal straight through her that made her gasp.

“I don’t know how this works,” she said breathlessly in a moment, pulling back, “I don’t know if you can really do this with three people, but I’m going to, for as long as you’ll both have me.”

Poe stared at her, dazed and bewildered, and Finn was grinning. “Yeah,” he said.

Poe blinked. “Okay,” he said.

 

Their little ship was undisturbed. Rey made Finn take Poe inside while she checked it over comprehensively. Then she piloted it to the agreed-upon spot halfway across the main continent, closer to the main city but not easily accessible from anywhere. There was interference, there, from rock formations and the traffic from the planet’s main spaceport, so Rey tucked it into a cliffside that Pava had scouted out and told them to make for. Poe spent the whole brief trip in the fresher, to Finn’s amusement. Ostensibly, Poe was showering. Rey didn’t want to think about him being sick in there. Hopefully he was better, enough that it wouldn’t be so bad for him this time. She decided not to tell any of that to Finn, who sat next to her and flipped the switches she asked him to with a blithe cheerfulness that was almost overwhelming, like sunshine in a long-dark room.

Then she went and used the fresher, since Poe had emerged and was back in his coveralls, looking devastatingly pink and clean. He didn’t look like he’d been sick, and he smiled easily at her, clearly as dazzled by Finn’s sunshine as she was. She unbraided her hair and washed it, wondering if she could get him to put it back how it had been. Apart from that, it was the fastest shower she’d ever taken in water, because she couldn’t wait to see what Finn and Poe were up to.

She came back out and Finn had pulled Poe down to straddle his lap in the copilot’s seat. Poe wasn’t totally committed to it, but he was blushing dark under his beard. “I made a mistake,” Finn was saying. “I didn’t know what the rules were.”

Rey dropped into the pilot’s chair and called up the interfaces, setting to a more aggressive programming for the proximity sensors. “I want you to tell me-- in words-- what happened between you two,” she said.

“I wanted to have sex with Poe,” Finn said, “but I wasn’t sure how those things worked. So I did, we did, and it was awesome. But at the same time there were other people I was making friends with on the base, and they wanted to have sex with me, and I didn’t know how the rules worked, so I did. And that really hurt Poe’s feelings because that’s cheating on someone, to have sex with other people, but I didn’t know how you decide when that’s a thing.”

“That’s confusing,” Rey agreed. “Sometimes it’s all right and sometimes it’s not?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Poe said, squirming in a discomfort that certainly wasn’t physical-- Rey could feel secondhand how good it felt to have their bodies fit together like that. “We hadn’t talked about anything, you were perfectly within your rights. I broke more rules than you did. I _used_ you, Finn, I was the one who fucked it up.”

“I hurt you anyway, though,” Finn said. “Whether I trip someone on purpose or by accident I still trip them, right? And so if they break their leg I still can feel bad about it. I hurt you and I never wanted to do that. I like you more than I like anybody else, and I’d rather have just you than any of those other people. But I want Rey too.”

“I want both of you,” Rey said, “and I want you to be together, and I don’t-- actually know how to have sex and I’m not sure I want to.” She turned away from her interface and spread her hands out. “There’s what I got. There’s what I know. I don’t know a whole lot.”

“I’m fine with that,” Finn said. “So-- I mean, I know you guys-- _something_ , last night, right?”

Poe looked shocked. “How would you know that?” he asked.

Rey considered it. “You can see it,” she said, “in the Force, sometimes. You can see everyone’s life force, can kind of get a read on things.”

“Poe’s life force is really luminous after orgasm,” Finn said. “Leia pointed it out to me.”

“What,” Poe said, perfectly blank.

“It’s how I knew which city to check for you,” Finn said, blithe and unworried. “Leia could see you in the Force.”

“Sweet fancy hyperdrives,” Poe said faintly. “What, _always_?”

“Apparently your whole life,” Finn said, “so think of that a moment.”

“I,” Poe said, looking horrified. “General Organa. Knows when I-- come.”

“I mean,” Finn said. “It’s not like it interrupts her. But yeah, she said she always found it kind of sweet and comforting, wherever you’d gone to she’d know you were having a good time sometimes.”

Poe’s mouth moved, but no sound came out, and he looked deeply, deeply mortified. “I don’t,” he said finally. “Know. How to deal with that.”

“I think it’s quite sweet,” Rey said, and went back to her resetting of the proximity sensors. It had begun to rain, and she took that into account, along with the various trees that would be moved by wind, and having carefully accounted for all of it, dialed the sensitivity way up on the sensors.

“Anyway,” Finn said. “I don’t care if you want to join in, Rey, or just watch, or if you only want Poe to touch you, or what, I just want to be around you, and go where you go, and--”

Rey stood up, and bent over Finn in the seat, realizing she’d kissed Poe but not him. She put her mouth on his and caught him mid-word; he caught his breath and made an awesome little noise, then licked her lower lip and sealed his mouth onto hers. It sent a profound jolt almost like electricity straight through her, and she pulled away after another moment, breathless and wide-eyed. “I want you too,” she said, “I just don’t know what it actually is that I want.”

Poe was staring dazedly at her, and turned his head a little to follow her as she sat. “Okay,” he said.

“You’ve had-- normal relationships,” Rey said. “You know how this works. Do people really never do it in threes?”

“I uh,” Poe said, “no, they do, it’s just-- not usually. I mean. Sometimes. Calling any of my relationships _normal_ is probably a gross overstatement. I mean.” He took a breath, visibly steadying himself, and blinked. “I um. No, it happens. It’s unusual. I think it’s just that much harder to maintain than couple relationships. But those are hard to keep up anyway. I mean. My track record is pretty shitty. You guys might be disappointed if you think I can deliver on any promises of _normal_. So who knows.” He regained a little of his usual aplomb, and grinned at both of them. “I’m willing to give it a shot, but I mean, the odds of all three of us surviving the current war aren’t great, so-- maybe we should just make hay while the sun shines. I’m all right with that. It's kind of the only thing I'm good at really.”

“I’m not following the idiom,” Finn said, “but I think I get you.”

Rey laughed in delight. “Good,” she said. “Now both of you, go get in the bed and get started in earnest, and let me concentrate on this stupid sensor array. I’m dialing up the proximity alarms so nobody can come get us, because I have no intention of keeping watch all night when I could be watching much better things.”

“We can keep you company here,” Finn said, and shifted his grip to haul Poe a little tighter against his body. Poe bit his lip, undulating a little in Finn’s grasp. “We won’t be too distracting. We’re good boys.”

Poe made the softest little moaning noise, and Rey could tell that Finn was grinding up against him, somewhere. “Poe really likes it when you pet him and tell him how good he is,” she said, making it sound like she was barely paying attention as she flicked through the sensor settings. “Grab him by the back of the neck and hang on.”

“Is that so,” Finn said, hands pulling at Poe’s hips. He tilted his face up, and Poe kissed him, hanging onto his shoulders, so hungrily it made Rey’s whole spine tingle, and a strange sort of twingey heat collect somewhere in her pelvis.

“He _has_ been an awfully good boy,” Rey said. “He’s been very brave, this whole time, and has done everything I’ve asked of him.”

Finn pulled away and made a comical show of looking down as if he’d misplaced something. “One thing he hasn’t been doing, apparently, is eating,” he said. “Where’s the rest of you?”

“It’s difficult to keep food down when you have constant vertigo,” Poe said a little tightly.

Finn wrapped his arms around Poe and pulled him in close, and kissed his jaw, his neck, his shoulder. He handled Poe’s body so familiarly, Rey found herself watching more in awe of his easy physicality than anything sexual. She’d never been touched like that. Poe went along with him, closing his eyes and letting Finn move him where he would. “If I could just-- wrap you up and take care of you,” Finn said. “I just want you to be safe.”

“I’m all right,” Poe said softly, running his fingers over Finn’s cheeks, his neck, his hair. He glanced over at Rey, and his face lit up with amusement. “We’re distracting our security detail.”

Rey blushed. “Take him to bed,” she said. “Take him to bed, Finn.”

“We can’t all fit in that bed,” Poe pointed out.

“Sure we can,” Rey said. The bunk was in a compartment in the wall, and it was wide enough for two. Maybe not for three. He might be right. “Or we can put the cushions on the floor. I’m sure we’ll work it out.”

“Mmmm,” Finn said, voice low and rumbling. “I think you need to be naked.”

“Both of you,” Rey said. “I’m working! I’m working. By the time you’re naked I’ll be done.” She double-checked her most recent work and found an error.

Next to her, Finn stood up, still holding Poe’s legs around his waist. Poe laughed. “Oh come on,” he said, “I’m not _this_ skinny.”

“I _probably_ won’t drop you,” Finn said, with reasonable confidence, and carried him across the tiny open space of the floor before pressing him into the wall and holding him there, squashing him into place and devouring his face. Poe made a fervent little noise and writhed in his grip, breathing hard.

“Oh,” Rey said, and considered that she had miscalculated; this was more interesting even than them making out in the chair next to her. She bit her lip, and checked over the last few sensors, and implemented the change. As she turned to look at what Finn was doing, pulling back and pinning Poe in place with his hips to skim Poe’s shirt off over his head, the alarms went off, and she cursed and turned back to the console.

Finn dropped Poe, who caught himself adeptly and howled with laughter, still half-trapped in his shirt, and Rey said, “I dialed it up too far! Just a minute!” and shut off the blaring alarms.

“I was doing so well,” Finn said, but took advantage of the situation to shove Poe against the wall and free him the rest of the way from his shirt. Once free, Poe reciprocated, pushing Finn’s jacket off his shoulders. Rey had to focus, and when she turned around again with the revised settings locked in, Finn was down to his underwear and lying on Poe sideways across the bed. Poe had his bare legs up around Finn’s waist, and that was all that was visible of him; clothing was scattered across the ship’s floor.

“Fuck,” Poe groaned, muffled, from somewhere inside the bunk, and Rey scrambled up to come watch.

“C’mere,” Finn said, seeing her hesitation. He patted the bunk. “We can make room.”

“I,” she said, and froze, torn between wanting to shed her coveralls and wanting to keep some kind of flimsy barrier between herself and the proceedings. She just-- she wasn’t sure. She wanted to see it, but she didn’t want to do it. Or, she did, but she didn’t want to just-- dive in, she wasn’t sure what it entailed or how it was done or-- anything.

“At least take your shoes off,” Finn said.

Rey considered it, and shed her boots. At the last moment, she shed the coveralls too. Underneath she still had a sleeveless undershirt and her undershorts. She climbed into the bed and sat at the head of it, legs curled under her, a pillow in her lap.

“There she is,” Poe said, soft and hoarse, and reached over to wrap his fingers around her ankle. “You let us know what you want, okay?”

“I want to see you,” she said, and his fingers were a little warmer than her skin, and it tingled straight to the bone, like he was burning her. “I want-- to see what you do.”

Finn surfaced from somewhere in Poe’s neck region and looked over at her, lust-dazed. “I can do that,” he said.

“That’s all she wanted last night too,” Poe said. “She just wanted to look at me.”

“Did you give her a show?” Finn asked.

“Well,” Poe said, “I don’t know how much of a show it was, I was in a vulnerable emotional state.”

“Really,” Finn said, catching his breath a little. He still had underwear on, as did Poe. Rey knew what Poe looked like, under his, but she didn’t know about Finn. His skin was so dark his hair was barely visible against it, and he was less hairy than Poe was; it was more that his hair caught the light and made his skin look like it was glowing from the inside, somehow. It was breathtaking, how beautiful he was. And in contrast to Poe’s currently-too-thin state, he was the picture of radiant, well-nourished health, thick and bulky and muscular for all his frame wasn’t much larger than Poe’s. He radiated health and vitality.

“Mm,” Poe said, “she pulled my hair until I cried, and then she told me I was a good boy, and I got off like crazy. It was actually sort of weird but I’m one hundred percent on board anytime she wants to do that again, it was kind of amazing.”

“Really,” Finn said. “You liked-- you like that, huh?” He looked over at Rey.

“There was more to it than that,” she said.

“I’ll explain kink to you sometime,” Poe said, and lifted his hips, shifting Finn over a little. “But just-- sometimes it feels really good to have someone just-- take over, you know?”

Finn’s expression was puzzled, gazing down at him. “I”ll take your word for it,” he said. Poe laughed, and Finn’s expression went soft, looking down. “I told myself,” he said, voice going soft and husky, “if I had the chance to touch you again, I wasn’t going to waste it,” and he held Poe’s face between his hands and bent down and kissed him, so long and so deep-- Rey could see his jaw working as he moved his tongue, he was really _in_ there, and that was the thing she couldn’t wrap her head around. Sex seemed to be nothing so much as invasions of a body, penetrations of a body, by another body, and she knew academically what was supposed to go where, but she couldn’t really truly understand _why_.

Poe’s eyes opened and shut, and they were rolling back in his head a little, and he had his hand around the back of Finn’s neck, and slid it down Finn’s back, down the ridge of his spine, and oh-- scar tissue-- there was the scar where Kylo had injured him so badly--

Something nudged at her mind, and she realized it was Poe, mentally inviting her in. He’d never done that before, but he was so focused now-- she must have bumped into him in her confusion.

_Find out_ , he thought, and she opened herself to him and suddenly she could feel the living warmth of Finn’s tongue against her teeth-- Poe’s teeth-- and the thick hot pressure of his body and the to-the-point-of-pain pleasure of Poe’s erection squashed against the crease of Finn’s hip.

_I want, I want,_ Poe thought, or maybe it was her, and she sucked in her breath and shivered, pressing her thighs together and biting her fingertip absently.

“Stars,” Poe gasped, “fuck, I need-- something-- c’mon.”

“What do you want?” Finn panted against his ear. “I’ll do anything you want.”

“Fuck,” Poe said, “I don’t have-- anything, here. Any--” Even from inside his mind, Rey wasn’t sure what he meant.

“Oh,” Finn said. “Well, it’s not like we have no options.” He sat up and Poe made a disgruntled noise, and Rey understood why, feeling Finn’s body warmth strip away so suddenly. Finn made to pull Poe’s undershorts off of him, but paused, and traced his hand down the black bruising that had come up down Poe’s ribs instead. “Poe, look at you,” he said, dismayed.

“It’s fine,” Poe said, impatient.

“If you say so,” Finn said, and curled his fingers in the waistband of Poe’s shorts, pulling them down and off, wriggling backward to give himself room. Rey looked her fill; she hadn’t actually really seen Poe naked, and despite all the various injuries, he really was beautiful. She made sure he heard her as she thought so, and he squirmed a little, amused but shyly pleased, knowing she couldn’t really lie to him like this.

Greatly daring, she put her hand out and ran her palm down his chest, feeling the softness of his skin and the crinkle of hair, there. He tipped his head back a little. “Rey,” he said unsteadily.

Finn made a delighted noise, smiling like the sun coming up; it wasn’t at all an innocent kind of delight, but it was somehow still very pure, and Rey couldn’t help but grin back at him in similar delight. “Look how pretty he is,” she said, like it was a secret she was telling Finn.

“He looks fucking delicious,” Finn said. “I’m going to actually devour him, I think.”

Rey watched raptly as Finn bent forward and wrapped his hand around Poe’s erection, which made Poe squirm delightfully with a fervent exclamation. Then Finn ducked his head down and took Poe’s erection into his mouth, which Rey had never even considered as a thing someone would do. She stared in shock, and belatedly remembered to see what Poe thought of this, and as soon as she opened herself to it, her mind was flooded with sensation-- hot and wet and slick and she actually moaned out loud in astonishment.

“Fuck,” Poe groaned, writhing in Finn’s grip, and Finn manhandled him with a casual effective grace that bewildered Rey, until Poe was lying with his head and shoulders in Rey’s lap and she was watching more or less over his shoulder as Finn worked on him.

“Oh my stars,” Rey said breathlessly, Poe’s heartbeat hammering against her hands on his chest, his breath coming fast and the blood pounding just under his skin indistinguishable from her own. Of course Finn knew what to do, knew how to handle Poe’s body, physically and sexually, and Rey watched, rapt, as Finn hauled one of Poe’s thighs up over his shoulder and hummed in satisfaction.

It was so much different than watching Poe touch himself, so much more intense to feel what he was feeling. Whatever barriers he’d tried to put up were swept away and he was given over totally to Finn, blasted out of any kind of self-discipline or self-denial.

She had pretty much a Poe’s-eye-view of the proceedings, so she couldn’t entirely see what Finn was doing with his other hand, but she could feel from Poe’s mind that Finn was pushing spit-slick fingers into Poe’s body, and it was-- she’d never been able to understand what the possible attraction of that would be, but it sent an intense curl of sensation up Poe’s spine, at first almost too intense, that then suddenly spiked over decidedly into pleasure, and the most distant-detached part of her mind noticed that she and Poe had made almost the same noise at the same time.

Finn glanced up at them, eyebrows eloquent even as his mouth was busy, and Poe groaned and laughed at the same time but didn’t manage to collect himself enough to actually speak. Finn looked at Rey, and quirked his eyebrows: _Kiss him_.

She could do that. She slid her hand up to his neck, turned his head, and pulled him in to take his mouth with hers, and he opened his mouth to her and let her in. It all made so much more sense now, and all three of them were tangled up in Poe’s body now, and she could feel how much pleasure Finn was getting out of the whole thing even though nobody’s genitals were involved in this besides Poe’s.

Poe’s tongue curled against her teeth, and one hand slid into her hair; the other was on the back of Finn’s neck, and she could feel it all from Poe’s perspective, could feel the hot firm slide of Finn’s tongue and the thick sure press of Finn’s fingers and the stuttering, breathless wave of pleasure that was steadily climbing Poe’s spine.

She curled herself protectively over all three of them, winding her awareness through both of their minds, and Poe clung to her, as if for comfort or support or-- or, _oh_. She understood then what he wanted and took him firmly into her mental grasp, pulling gently, and he cried out into her mouth and went tense all over as his whole body wound up taut, trembling on the edge.

Finn made a low, fervent sound and curled his fingers, and Poe shuddered hard as the wave crashed through him into her, and she held him through it as he shook and shook and sobbed for breath. She had to let go of his mouth and breathe, herself; it rebounded through her too, and she stole one of her hands back and pressed the heel of her hand between her legs and shivered through a strange familiar paroxysm, not quite anything she’d ever felt before but still something she knew.

Finn was talking, soft and sweet and low, murmuring to Poe, “so good for me, so sweet, was that what you needed, baby?”

Poe moaned, too far gone for words, and Rey leaned in and kissed one side of his face, and Finn leaned up and kissed the other side of his face, and he laughed and shivered, and Rey curled herself all through his mind and pushed away his little doubts.

_Mine_ , she thought, and found a little tentative probe of Finn’s, and curled around that too. _Mine_ , and she pulled Finn in further, and showed him where she was fixing Poe’s injuries, and Finn lit up, more confident and brighter, and added his strength to hers. Poe went still, open and trusting and completely unresisting, but it wasn’t the old resigned passiveness he’d used to approach their sessions with. No, it was more like he was basking in them.

Rey pulled back a little bit, giving Finn more room to radiate, and pulled up, directing her energy out to make a shield. She could sense it now, could sense the tracker pulse in Poe. It wasn’t a single device, it was a collection of very small devices, nano-trackers. They were all through his body, in his blood, embedded in his tissues, most near the site where he’d been injected with the rhyndo but some carried away by the lymphatic and circulatory systems.

The pulse they gave off wasn’t how a normal tracker worked, either. They were designed-- _oh_.

They were fluctuations in the Force. If you knew to look for them, you’d be able to find him in the Force, from any distance.

They had been put in expressly for a Force user to track him with. Rey spread herself out very carefully and thinly, and muted the trackers, one by one, muffling them gradually. She couldn’t shut them up permanently, could only muffle them for a little while.

She could tell who had been looking; Kylo Ren’s ragged energy traces were all around the edges of the trackers’ vibrations. He wasn’t looking, now; he was in hyperspace, she vaguely thought. It was just an impression, but it was a clear one, of movement-- _towards_.

“Where’d you go?” Finn murmured. She blinked, not really surfacing from her trance, and mentally reached out to him.

“Kylo Ren,” she said, and felt Poe lift his head sharply from where it was resting on her shoulder. “He’s coming here.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke makes a wall. Rey gives Poe a superpower, maybe. Ackbar makes a discovery. Bolt makes a decision.

“No,” Luke said, “he doesn’t know we’re here.”

It was taking everything Leia had not to reach out and try to touch her son’s mind through the shield Luke had thrown around them. If Luke weren’t also physically there, she might have brushed it all aside recklessly and ruined everything.

Kes was watching her, dark eyes in shadow, standing beside her on the bridge of the cruiser. He reached out and put his hand around her arm. “I know,” he murmured. They were in the midst of ferrying ground troops down to the planet, a few at a time, and so there were more people milling about the bridge than Leia strictly wanted to be observed by, just now. They were far enough away, behind an asteroid belt and a moon, that the First Order ships arriving to the planet now-- several small ships, flying close, and Ben was in one of them, so close she felt the heat of him shimmer by-- wouldn’t have picked their signature up. If the First Order had brought a ship of the line, however, it would have detected them.

“Does he know where they are?” Leia asked.

Luke was staring out the viewport, eyes distant. He looked so old, so very old. “Not exactly,” he said. “Rey has the trackers muffled while she’s close to him. Which might make him suspicious, but also means he won’t be able to just go straight to Poe. He’ll have to hunt a little, until Rey pulls back.”

“Then it will be a distraction,” Leia said.

“Exactly,” Luke said.

“And Rey’s making it so Poe can resist a Force interrogation,” Kes said.

“Yes,” Leia said.

“Sounds like a neat trick,” Kes said, and Leia gave him a look, and remembered what he’d gone through so long ago.

“I think,” she said, considering what she’d understood and observed of the conversation Luke had had with Rey about it. But then she decided that explaining it was probably not something Kes truly needed. “Well, I don’t think it’d be fun regardless.”

“You can do it,” Luke said, and Leia could tell he was speaking to Rey.

“She’s having doubts?” she asked.

Luke set his jaw, though his eyes stayed deceptively mild-looking. “It’s a hard thing, that we’ve asked her to do.”

“Poe volunteered,” Leia said.

“That doesn’t make it much easier,” Luke said. He closed his eyes, and Leia couldn’t hear what he said to her.

_________

 

“It doesn’t entirely make sense,” Ackbar said. He was the most senior officer still on the base. He and Ematt had convened, and had decided to immediately interview Dara Cluitt while the rest of the base flurried around trying to scramble reinforcements to Util. Karé had inserted herself into the conversation only enough to ensure that she could be present for the interview. She’d been too unnerved to contribute more than that.

Karé was sitting with her hands under her thighs and her mouth clamped shut, and Arana, still vaguely nauseous from the sedatives, was propped next to her, looking gray and peaked.

“I have failed in my mission,” Dara said, “but I— I have reason to believe I was meant to, sir.” She looked awful, ashen under her dark skin, and clearly sick with terror, but she had been brave so far, hadn’t cracked or begged or lost her ability to speak. “And so I am telling you the truth.”

“I don’t doubt you,” Ackbar said kindly. Kun wondered if Dara were as uncomfortable with xenos as Teeny had been, or if she’d appreciate the kindness.

“And I am asking you, sir, for mercy, on behalf of my comrades,” Dara went on, chin rising a little. Kun liked her despite herself; she was brave. “Perhaps they were not genuine defectors, but I would argue they had no ability to make any kind of choice in the matter for themselves.”

“Teeny said that you asked them to vote on all the decisions you’ve made here,” Ackbar said mildly.

Dara hesitated, then nodded tightly. “But even that was my choice, sir,” she said. “I thought it made no sense to expect to command obedience as I would have in our former context, so I put it to a vote, and we elected to make the choices we did. But I would stress that none of the others had ever been allowed to vote on anything before in their lives. I am the only one with the education and command background to truly have made any informed choice.”

“We have no plans to execute or in any way punish any of you,” Ackbar said, making the face that on a Mon Calamari, Kun had slowly learned, indicated a concerned sort of frown. It was an odd scrunching/pricking of his face appendages.

Dara radiated disbelief. “I am an enemy soldier and a spy,” she said. “I ask for no special consideration. But the others were conscripted troops.”

“Do you still consider yourself an enemy of the New Republic?” Ackbar asked.

Dara’s expression slid a little sideways, into a grim sort of uncertain hesitance. “I do,” she said. “I must. I swore oaths, and at least I had the pretense of knowing what I was doing when I swore them.”

“Your superiors in the First Order sent you on a mission that you believe was deliberately meant to fail,” Ackbar said. “We have already begun to puzzle out why they would waste so much manpower, and risk so much of a transfer of information to us.” This was news to Karé, who had been wondering that herself. It was possible, or it was possible that Ackbar was bluffing. He was, after all, a canny old soul. “But on your own account, does that not shake your loyalty?”

Dara gazed steadily at him. “I am not so vain as to think this a test of myself, arranged by my superiors,” she said. “I have reason to believe, however, that it is a test of _you_ , and as such, I feel that my answers retain meaning. No, my loyalty is not shaken, sir. I will not turn for you, but I pledge my cooperation and good behavior as suits a prisoner of my station.”

“Fascinating,” Ackbar said. “But what of the others?”

“On their behalf,” Dara said, “I repeat, I ask for mercy. They are free to choose, as far as I am concerned; I would advise them to become true defectors, and to throw themselves into your cause. That is not something I feel I can do, but I believe they should. I ask you to allow this.”

“I don’t believe it would be a very sensible course of action for us to take that offer at face value,” Ackbar said.

“As a gesture of good faith,” Dara said, “I offer to you this: there are trackers or locators of some sort, implanted in our bodies. I know they are undetectable. I also know for certain they are active.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Ackbar asked.

“Because I am certain you will discover it,” Dara said, “and so telling you now saves you some effort, while not requiring me to truly commit an act of betrayal. Also it explains our actions. We sent Bolt to confront General Hux, and we knew he would succeed because he has trackers hidden in his body, and so Hux will find him and the confrontation will in fact take place.”

“What do you hope to gain from that confrontation?” Ackbar asked. “You have jeopardized our operation to save Util; those stakes are very high indeed.”

“Bolt has no intention of sabotaging your work,” Dara said. “Not in this matter.”

“Then what could he gain by interfering?” Ackbar said.

“With all due respect, sir,” Dara said, “that is not information I am willing to share with you at this time.”

Ackbar let out a slow, heavy sigh; that transcended species barriers as a method of communication, though his were less to do with the mechanics of his breathing and more to do with deliberate emoting. “That,” he said, “does not reassure me.”

“Nonetheless,” Dara said, steely, “it is an honest answer.”

Karé stood up and walked out into the other room, where Teeny and the others were sitting. Teeny looked up at her, blank-faced. Her feet were turned in uncertainly, shoulders hunched, and one of her hands made an absent-minded-looking gesture of pleading.

“What does Bolt want to ask Hux?” she asked Teeny.

Teeny stared up at her, and very tentatively made a hand gesture. “If he meant it,” she whispered.

“If he meant what?” Karé asked.

“He sent us,” Teeny said, and stopped talking, biting her lip. “To— to—“ She wrung her hands together; if that meant anything, Karé didn’t know what. “It doesn’t make sense that the pilots were all poisoned, not if he was serious, we need to know if he was serious about our mission or not.”

“By deciding to do this you ruined your ability to blend in,” Karé said.

“We couldn’t have anyway,” Teeny said. “That was what we decided.” She went even blanker, and stilled her hands.

“Is that true?” Ackbar asked. Oh. He’d followed her out. He’d brought Dara and followed her out.

Dara looked stubborn. But she looked at Teeny for a long moment, and Teeny eventually met her gaze and looked back. “Yes,” Dara said. She sighed, and walked over to sit down next to Teeny. “Hux sent us to find out if the Resistance would be willing to negotiate a peace, or if you were so set against the Order that no negotiation would be possible. He wanted us to find out how we would be treated.”

“And wanted you to infiltrate,” Ackbar said, but gently.

Dara shook her head. “Not in any substantive way,” she said. “We have trackers, but it’s possibly only so he can verify our reports later.”

“And you need to confront him,” Ackbar prompted her.

“Because if he’s not serious about wanting to negotiate,” Dara said, “then I can’t bring myself to sound you out about it. He chose me because I was principled. He can’t be astonished by this.”

“This is truly fascinating,” Ackbar said. “I doubt our reinforcements will reach Util in time, but I will send this information with them.”

 

_________

 

 

Poe’s arm had fallen completely asleep, and the pain in his shoulder was what eventually woke him from a very strange unformed dream. Rey was in it, laughing; she kissed him sweetly, eyes dark and intense, then pushed him back and said _I can’t do this_ , and Finn was behind her, intense-looking, and he said, _you have to_.

_Kylo Ren is coming_ , Rey said, looking anguished.

Poe grunted, tried to roll over, and failed, because his left arm was so numb he couldn’t even tell where it was. He struggled, flailed, and managed to roll over the other direction, onto his back.

He was in a room he’d never seen before. It spun, sickeningly, and he closed his eyes. Rhyndo. He’d forgotten.

He pried his eyes open again after a moment of wallowing. How had he forgotten? How long had he been out? Where was he?

He sat up, wavering badly, cradling his numb arm in his lap, and looked around in rising panic. He couldn’t remember where he was. The _Unyielding_ , okay, the rhyndo, and then it was all-- hazy. Chewbacca, maybe? Luke-- Rey? He knew he’d spoken with Rey. He’d been somewhere with Rey. He’d.

He couldn’t remember. Something was wrong. Something was _wrong_.

He scrambled to his feet and staggered sideways, completely unable to keep his balance, hindered by his numb arm. He’d been lying on his face on a duracrete floor and he was freezing. He was wearing unfamiliar clothes, a tunic he’d never seen before, his shower sandals-- what the hell, he never wore those in public, he looked like a beggar in them. He set his back against the wall and tried again to stand up, inching along the wall and holding himself up with the arm that had feeling. The other arm was starting to prickle with pins and needles, really unpleasantly.

He had bruises all over his torso, his knees, and his hands. His knuckles were skinned on one hand, maybe a day’s worth of healing. He didn’t remember that happening. He rubbed at his face and realized with shock that he had-- he had a _beard_ , he’d never had a beard in his _life_ , what the _hell_.

Rhyndo. It caused brain damage. He’d never heard that it caused amnesia but it was perfectly likely it did. He had great gaping holes in his brain that would never be any better and now he had big holes in his memory too.

His knees gave out and he sat back down. He had no idea where he was, what planet this was, how long he’d been here. It had to be a planet, not a ship or a space station, but that was all he had to go on. It was a storage room, in a basement-- there was a window, high on the wall, made with transparicrete blocks, and the room was dimly lit with the daylight from outside. There was nothing in the room. Duracrete floors, duracrete block walls, painted gray, duracrete ceiling painted dingy white, no fixtures or furniture.

He crawled, wincing at his bruised and skinned knees-- again, about a day’s healing, when he sat and pulled one trouser leg up to check. Wait, he knew these trousers. They were his, a solid pair of work trousers that fit him well. They— they were the ones Finn had mended. Finn had mended them because they’d gotten singed by a blaster when Karé Kun had saved his life.

Finn’s hand had made these stitches, and Poe brushed his fingertips lingeringly over the beautifully-sewn patch, like somehow he could absorb some tiny piece of Finn’s presence that way.

The trousers were far too loose. He’d dropped significant weight since last he’d worn them.

They’d fit when he’d left on the mission for-- Util, he’d been meant to go to Util, he’d only stopped off at the _Unyielding_ on impulse, like a dumb asshole.

He was missing weeks, not hours or days like he’d assumed. Enough for a beard, enough to lose weight and condition. He put his hand up and felt that his hair was long and unkempt, too. Weeks.

Panic, that was what he was feeling-- he was dizzy anyway, but this on top of it was worse. No time for panic, _Dameron, pull yourself together_ , but it didn’t help much.

He scrambled to the door and found that, of course, it was locked. Deadbolt, from outside. Hinges on the outside, it swung outward. No good, nothing to work with.

_Kylo Ren is coming._

Poe gritted his teeth and made himself check every inch of the wall, as high as he could see, as low as he could crawl, for a way out or something he could use or something he could do. Because he knew the reason he’d been rhyndo’d was for the bounty, and the reason for the bounty was Kylo Ren, and Kylo Ren was coming, he had to be.

Maybe that was where he’d seen Rey. Maybe she’d been trying to warn him through the Force. But what the hell was he supposed to do? He couldn’t answer her back, he had no sensitivity, he had no gifts himself. He couldn’t even stand up. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know what was happening. Did she know where he was? Was anyone coming for him?

No one was coming for him, that was the thing about this kind of work: no one could come for him. The Resistance couldn’t acknowledge him. No one was coming for him.

It didn’t matter that his knees were shaking too badly to hold him, because he couldn’t balance well enough to stand anyway.

He was at the far side of the room when without warning the door lock clunked and the door swung open. He turned at bay, propping himself against the wall, trying not to cower.

A big Shozer came in, bigger and older than Goss, and eyed him grimly. “So you’re awake,” he said.

“Am I?” Poe said intelligently.

“You were out a long time,” the Shozer said. “We were worried we’d damaged you more than you already are.”

This wasn’t giving Poe any hopeful feelings. “Where am I?” he asked. “Who are you?”

The Shozer looked surprised. “You don’t remember me at all?”

Poe shook his head slowly. “Never seen you in my life,” he said.

The Shozer looked obscurely pleased. “Well I never,” he said. “I guess-- well! Right, right.” He cleared his throat and looked stern, coming to loom over Poe. “I wouldn’t wish this fate on anyone,” he said.

“I guess we’re not friends,” Poe hazarded a guess. He hadn’t really been hoping for much.

“No, no,” the Shozer said. “You’re good at this.”

“I’m good at a lot of things,” Poe said.

The Shozer loomed closer, and grabbed his arm. “I’d feel a lot guiltier about this,” he said, “but it’s a lot of money, you know? Don’t try anything funny, now.”

“What’s the bounty up to now?” Poe asked, heart lurching up to hammer in his throat. He thought of fighting, as the Shozer’s big three-fingered hand closed around his bicep, but he couldn’t even stand up, and he was shaking too hard to try.

“I don’t even know,” the Shozer said. “I won’t ever see any of it directly. Suits me fine, it’s blood money, that’s bad luck.”

Poe didn’t even try to walk, just let the guy drag him. “You’re really convincing,” the Shozer said, then hushed himself. “Right, right. Right. So, um. Whatever they do to you, I hope it’s quick when it happens.”

“It won’t be,” Poe said resignedly. “It wasn’t last time.”

“Oh, you’ve done this before?” The Shozer peered admiringly at him as they waited for the turbolift. Wherever they were, it was a fancy building; the elevator had decorative transparisteel panels.

“‘Swhy the bounty’s so high,” Poe said. “Last time they captured me I stole a Stormtrooper and a TIE fighter and got away.”

“I heard that one,” the Shozer said admiringly, hauling him into the turbolift. “I mean, that’s terrible. That’s awful. We’re big fans of the First Order, here. We sure are.”

“I don’t even understand what you’re trying to do,” Poe admitted quietly, eyes squeezed shut against the awful vertigo the motion of the turbolift was producing.

“Shh,” the Shozer said, a little awkwardly. “It-- it’ll be all right. I’m not supposed to have been talking to you at all. Pretend I didn’t?”

“Whatever buffs your scales, man,” Poe said.

“You know about that?” the Shozer asked, glancing over. Shozers had a complicated maintenance routine that they performed on their scales and rarely told outsiders about. It was a thing. Goss had gotten drunk and told Poe about it once, and in return Poe had explained his deal with his hair. It took a lot to get a Shozer drunk, like a truly improbable amount. It was when Poe had decided Goss was okay, and had given him BB’s reset codes the next day when they were both still hung-over.

“Got a good buddy who’s a Shozer,” Poe said, with some difficulty. He swallowed hard. “We almost there? I’m gonna puke.”

“Almost there,” the Shozer said, gruff and gentle, and the turbolift stopped with a lurch. Poe gritted his teeth and swallowed again, squeezing his eyes shut. The Shozer pulled him up, carefully manhandled him out of the elevator, and stood for a moment with him in the hallway as he breathed deeply for a few moments, pushing the nausea back down.

“Can you make it?” the Shozer asked at last.

“Maybe,” Poe said. He risked opening his eyes. They were above ground now, they were far above ground, and there were big windows along the corridor looking out over a planet he was sure he’d never been on before. “Seriously, what fucking planet is this?”

“Util,” the Shozer said quietly.

Util. That was where the mission had been supposed to be. He’d stopped off at the _Unyielding_ on the way. And had apparently lost weeks. And the point of Util was that in several weeks the First Order would come for a handover--

_Kylo Ren is coming_.

“Oh,” Poe said, and the air whooshed out of him. His mission had failed, then. The First Order was here and he was getting sold out. Along with the planet. “You don’t know how long I’ve been here, do you?”

“You really,” the Shozer began, but then snapped his jaw shut alarmingly. “No,” he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

Clearly, he did, but that was all Poe was getting at this moment. “Something’s wrong with my head,” Poe said softly. “Besides the rhyndo.”

“It’s just as well,” the Shozer said, “given what’s on the other side of those doors. Come on, I have to take you.”

“Okay,” Poe said, because there was no point. If your planet wasn’t equipped to resist-- if the operative the Resistance sent to you showed up _broken_ and _useless_ \-- there wasn’t a whole lot you could do when the First Order arrived, or the Knights of Ren, or whoever they’d brought. He couldn’t blame this guy. He pried his eyelids up and gave the Shozer as considering a look as he could manage, what with the world busy spinning. The man looked desperately sad. Poe patted him on the shoulder. “It’s not your fault, I know.”

“Stars,” the Shozer said, annoyed, “don’t be _nice_ to me.”

Poe gave him a grim smile, and closed his eyes. “Well,” he said, “let’s not fuck around, then.”

______________

 

The only thing that kept Finn from turning around and running back after Poe was watching the stiff line of Rey’s shoulders as she struggled with the same thing. What she’d done had been incredibly difficult, and to fuck it up now would make that all be for nothing. So Finn kept his mouth shut and kept moving and tried to have faith and discipline, like he’d tried to teach his people.

They had to go through a convoluted series of back alley entrances to get to the meeting place, winding up traipsing over half of the unfamiliar city like a scavenger hunt, looking for the unobtrusive symbols that marked the next waypoint on the directions. Finn felt exceptionally silly because he was wearing a coat with a hood, to make him less recognizable, and he’d never worn such a garment in his life and felt like he must be giving off the impression of a boy playing dress-up Jedi.

He kept his eyes fixed on Rey’s hair. Poe had braided Rey’s hair, the last thing he’d done as they’d prepared, and it felt like-- a promise, maybe. If he could come back to them before she had to take it out, it would be there as a reminder. It was an intricate braid, her hair pulled back and woven into a panel down the back of her head, the tail of it wound back up through the woven part like a crown. A beautiful thing, the only fancy thing she was wearing.

They finally wended their way into a dead-end alley and through a hidden door into a basement, and suddenly the narrow winding hallway opened out into a dim room full of hushed voices. “Ah,” Skywalker said quietly, from the shadows at the other end of the room, “here they are.”

“It is done,” Rey said, and her voice didn’t shake. “Dameron is in position.”

“We have confirmed that Kylo Ren is enroute,” another voice said. “We know that Dameron cannot resist a Force interrogation from him. Won’t he give the plan away?”

“No,” Skywalker said, when Rey didn’t answer. “He’s been prepared.” Rey had her mouth clamped shut, and Finn could see the pain in her expression, but if he hadn’t known her so well he probably wouldn’t have picked up on it. “You need not worry.”

There was some murmuring; apparently not everyone had been in on this part of the plan. “They will expect us to want to rescue him,” Leia said, speaking up from the shadows. “They will waste time trying to extract information from him, and gloating over having him, and seeking to leverage their possession of him against us.”

“And torturing him,” someone else said, out of Finn’s line of view, but he didn’t say it loudly, and Leia turned her head slightly but did not acknowledge him. The man sounded more resigned than anything else.

“So we can move with impunity, if we do it fast,” Leia said. “The cruiser is set to assume position. We want to trap them on the planet. We most likely won’t be able to take any Force users hostage, but we should be able to capture or kill whatever officers they’ve brought with them. At the very least, we can prevent them taking control, and we will have exposed all of their operatives on this planet by letting them appear to have succeeded.”

Everyone nodded along thoughtfully; Finn’s eyes were adjusting in the dim space and he could start to see that about a third of the people here were Resistance operatives he knew. The rest were presumably locals.

“The disposition of our ground troops has been seen to,” Leia said, “and we have strike teams in position at the major power plants and infrastructure control points. The First Order has not brought with them the manpower to secure these, because they assumed this was a peaceful takeover. Admiral Statura is handling the coordination of these groups. If you are unsure of your assignment, speak to him before you leave.”

The meeting devolved into more discussion of logistics, and Luke took over speaking. Kes Dameron suddenly appeared at Finn’s elbow. Finn hadn’t been able to get much of a read on the man, but he had done enough research to figure the guy was probably worth being a little bit afraid of. He’d been politically active before the Rebellion, as a very young man, and had been brutally interrogated by the Empire over his family’s involvement in separatist politics; this had turned him to the Rebellion, and he’d joined up and had nearly instantly made a name for himself as an extremely effective operator in antipersonnel and sabotage missions. He’d served with distinction throughout the entire war, and had retired with the rank of Sergeant as the conflict wound down, once the Republic had been established. He’d left virtually no written record of himself, but his name was wound all through innumerable after-action reports. And in the decades since the war he had worked tirelessly to establish the colony on Yavin 4, had become a notable presence in Outer Rim politics, but had never occupied any official positions within the New Republic.

“You saw Poe,” Kes said.

“Yes,” Finn said, and felt his face get very slightly hot, remembering how mortified Poe had been when he’d realized Leia had such close tabs on his sexual activity. Finn understood that Poe was upset not because attachments were forbidden but because there was some kind of stratification of relationships, where it was embarrassing to disclose one’s sex life to people who occupied a different relationship niche. A father was definitely in the not-to-disclose segment, though Finn couldn’t grasp the subtleties of it yet. He just knew that he was wrong to be nervous that an officer might discover his personal attachments.

Kes read something in his expression, and his face softened. His expression had been almost always unrelentingly either grim or forbidding, but it softened sometimes, and it was clear that he was not normally a grim person. The lines on his face spoke much more to smiling than scowling.

“How was he?” Kes asked.

Finn considered that. “He was all right,” he said. “He could walk, but he needed support. He was in good spirits, mostly.” He closed one eye for a moment, thinking. “He was wholeheartedly supportive of the plan.”

“Of course he was,” Kes said, bitterness twisting his mouth a little. He crossed his arms across his midsection, hunching his shoulders a little. He was built taller and narrower than Poe, but there was a similarity in their solidity.

Finn considered his new knowledge of Kes Dameron’s career. “He’s survived another interrogation already,” he said. “When I met him.”

“I told myself,” Kes said, looking down and away, “all those things I survived were to make a world where my son wouldn’t ever face those kinds of things.” He laughed, a humorless and painful sound, then clapped Finn on the shoulder. “Well, I hope whatever that Rey did for him helps him resist.”

“I hope so too,” Finn said.

________

 

The comm came alive with a blip that startled Bolt out of his zoned-out trance. He was in trouble, was the thing; he was definitely too sick to endure the stresses of zero-G, and he was starting to go fuzzy and his nose had started bleeding again, and he wasn’t sure but he thought he might have had a seizure, he was sort of disoriented and had lost a little bit of time.

Cluitt hadn’t really intended this to be a suicide mission but it might end up being one, he’d had time to reflect. He supposed if he were pretty sure he were dying he could crash the X-Wing somewhere useful on his way out, but he hadn’t really decided. He didn’t really want to die and desiccate out here, pointlessly. He’d always figured on some kind of blaze of glory. It’d be dumb if it was a manufactured one, but he’d take what he could get.

“Poe Dameron,” the comm said, sounding smug and satisfied and well, fuck, it was Kylo Ren. The syllables were meaningless to Bolt for a moment, until he manually sorted through them and extracted the meaning: the guy everyone kept saying he looked like. Oh, the X-Wing pilot, right. He was in a Resistance X-Wing. And they’d theorized there was a tracker they couldn’t find.

Bolt fumbled, missed the switch, tried again and hit it. Sure enough, the stupid mask came up on the holo display. Stupid to have visual on if there was no face to see. Whatever. His own face was hidden behind a visor too. “Kylo Ren,” he said.

“Can you actually fly like this?” Kylo Ren asked, smug and amused.

“Fuck you,” Bolt said, because he was more sensitive than he’d thought about not being any good at flying this fucking bucket, and also because he’d always wanted to say that to Kylo Ren.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Kylo Ren said. “You know, it wasn’t just rhyndo, in that syringe. In case you’re wondering how we found you so easily.”

_I’m fucking sitting between you and the planet you’re on your way to_ , Bolt thought incredulously, _how could you_ not _have found me_ , but he supposed he should play along with this Poe thing, and letting on that he’d intended for them to find him would tip that hand rather too much. “You shot me up with a tracker too, huh,” Bolt said, and it figured, the lazy shits had used the same trackers in the defectors as the captured pilot. So much for that. He had to be able to use this somehow. Well, for maximum chaos, if nothing else.

He was finding that the longer he was undrugged, even if he was sick as hell from it, the more he wanted to say fuck it to any kind of mission and just trade it in for chaos.

“Of course I did,” Kylo said, nearly purring.

“Fuck you,” Bolt said again, because that had felt really good. He thought of a pretty great blaze of glory, all right. “Hey, you got Hux on that bucket with you? I’d love to say hi to him.”

“I’m sure you would,” Kylo said. “He told me how he knows you, by the way. I had forgotten what a slut you were, Dameron.”

_What_. “No way,” Bolt said out loud, but his finger wasn’t on the switch. Fuck, he’d never get to tell that one to anybody, and that was possibly the best piece of gossip he’d ever heard in his entire life. _Fuck_. “Well,” he said into the comm, “you know,if you were jealous, you _could_ just ask.”

“I don’t have to ask,” Kylo said, unnervingly.

“Well that’s fuckin’ sick,” Bolt said, and made up his mind. He flipped on the engines and oriented himself, dizzy. “I guess I don’t have to keep pretending I’m space junk.”

“Were you planning on going somewhere?” Kylo asked.

“Not really,” Bolt said, calling up the legend overlay for the controls so he could puzzle out which thrusters went which direction. Ah. An X-Wing wasn’t particularly nimble, but it was pretty heavy. He didn’t have to know how to use the cannons for what he had in mind. The burners came right up to temp, sweet as anything— okay, he could see why people who liked to fly big fuck-off starcraft might enjoy this thing— and he angled the thrusters so that he would hit the oncoming First Order transport square amidships, and then gave it full juice.

Fuck this mission. He was defecting for real, especially if it was the last thing he ever did.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, this chapter is short, but the Big Doings totally need rewritten and also they were making this chapter like 16k long and I'm not willing to deviate from the chapter length by that much. Also I've been saying six chapters but this entire time I've had it on my hard drive in seven chapters so I don't know what I was thinking. It'll definitely be seven chapters at least. We'll see if it's more.  
> Also TECHNICALLY it is STILL WEDNESDAY so I am NOT LATE so I'll count this as an accomplishment. 
> 
> Please be gentle with me if there are errors, my editing perhaps left something to be desired here.


	6. My Race Is Nearly Run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One hopes we've reached the point where the plot can't thicken any further and starts to resolve. One might hope that in vain, but one hopes regardless. 
> 
>  
> 
> “I know the difference between a forlorn hope and total futility,” Poe said. “But, I mean, if you really insist."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the unplanned hiatus. C'est la vie; even enabling wifi through my cellphone in the yurt didn't make it so I had time to write anyway. But rest assured I'm at my super-boring office job for a couple of weeks, so provided I can stave off existential angst, I should be able to get chapter 7 out before the farm sucks me back in. And uhh. Probably there'll be a chapter 8, but we'll see. This one's another shortish chapter because reasons, so maybe I'll just make chapter 7 super long and epic. We'll see.
> 
> Since I have the musical creativity of wet paper, here's the song Poe remembers: [Angel Band](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2-Sf_yHQfU), as performed by the Pearsall Sisters (who performed it in O Brother Where Art Thou, though the soundtrack version is the original Stanley Bros version). It probably got stuck in Kes's head something awful, and he probably was justified in hating it, but Poe probably still sings it when he's run out of other material, and passes off any maudlin feelings as it being a kind of sentimental song anyway.  
> We will not speculate as to whether it gets stuck in Kylo's head, ever, or if he hums it whilst striding dramatically about in floor-length robes, as one does.

“Er,” the senator’s aide said, as Poe swayed dizzily in the Shozer’s grip, “well, this is a bit awkward.”

“What is?” the Shozer asked. 

“The um,” the aide said. They were in a posh sitting room of some kind, with little conversational groupings of furniture and a decorative transparisteel window assemblage in a corner that offered a stunning view of the outdoors and made Poe incredibly disoriented and dizzy— even healthy, he disliked windows that extended into the floor like that, and rhyndo’d, it was just nightmarish. 

He tried to focus on the furnishings, but all he could really make out was that somebody’d laid out a buffet table of appetizers and such, like some kind of important reception or meeting was about to go down in here, and that was only making him feel more sick.

“Really,” the Shozer said, “what?”

“Well,” the aide said. She waved a hand at Poe, who thought briefly about throwing up on her. “We contacted the First Order to say we had none other than the notorious Poe Dameron in custody, you know, because we do.”

“Sure do,” Poe said tightly. 

The aide smiled absently at him before continuing, “--and they said that they already had him.”

The Shozer jiggled Poe’s arm. “But-- how?”

“Buddy,” Poe said tightly, “I wasn’t lying, I’m gonna puke.”

“Here,” the aide said, gently pushing him down into a chair and wetting a napkin to put on the back of his neck. “It’s all right, dear. Close your eyes a moment.” She got him another napkin, put it over his eyes, and went back to talking with the Shozer, dim and distant.

After a moment of breathing deep and letting the nausea ebb a bit, Poe peeled the napkin away from his face, and they both turned and looked at him expectantly. “He looks like the holo, though,” the Shozer said. 

“No no,” the aide said, “we’re quite sure this is him, that’s not even in doubt. And yet. They say they already have him in their custody at this moment.”

“Xacristo,” Poe said, lapsing into the dialect of his father’s weird old drinking buddies in his disorientation, “are you saying they think I’m not me? Are you for fucking real?” 

“I’m more weirded out that there’s apparently another Poe Dameron out there, myself,” the aide said, with a glimmer of nervous humor. Poe’s vision had settled a little, and he could make her out now. She was a pretty Twi’lek in high-class corporate-chic attire, a famous Coruscanti label discreetly adorning her glittering hip belt. “From what I know of your reputation, the galaxy could hardly handle two.”

“I mean-- this is for sure the guy,” the Shozer said. “Look at his eyes, he’s even rhyndo’d.”

The aide peered into Poe’s face with a delicate grimace of disgust. “What a barbaric practice,” she said.

“Thanks,” Poe said drily. “I wonder who the other poor chump is that they’ve already captured,” he mused in a moment, pulling the wet napkin off the back of his neck. “It’d be a shame if you couldn’t get your money because of him.”

“I’m more interested in what organization would possibly be able to field such a convincing Poe Dameron replica that they could fool Kylo Ren,” the aide said. “I mean, maybe he’s never met D-- er, you, but I thought he was like a Jedi, only evil. Can’t they read minds?”

Poe almost threw up again, so he sat in total silence for a long moment, swallowing hard against a sudden incredibly vivid memory of Ben Organa’s earnest face, dark eyes wide in wary interest, layered over the greasy invasive feeling of Kylo Ren’s mind sliding into his own. “No,” he said softly, at last, “Kylo Ren has met me before. He’d certainly know.”

“Well,” the aide said. “He himself said you were an impostor.”

“Maybe you’d better let me go then,” Poe said, shooting for breezy and missing by a wide margin: it came out sort of forlorn. 

“Where would you go?” the aide asked, and Poe really didn’t need her pity. 

 

______

 

Finn’s earlier observation that Kes Dameron was terrifying had been an accurate one. Kes was viciously efficient as they secured the capital city’s power distribution center, instantly sizing up every possible weakness in the structure and dispatching cover to every entrance. Finn met up with him in the middle and found that they’d both been equally thorough at their halves of the job. With one difference: Finn had a prisoner, a First Order diehard who’d refused to cede control of his aspect of the operation, while Kes had a spatter of blood down the front of his uniform.

“I don’t take prisoners,” Kes said, noting the same difference Finn had, and his face could have been graven from stone. 

“I don’t waste time on prisoners,” Finn said, “but this one came easily enough.” He’d have heard a blaster if Kes had used one. So would everyone, which was probably why he hadn’t. A blaster wouldn’t have caused a blood splatter like the one on Kes’s jacket. Finn was not aware of any standard secondary armament that would. He decided not to ask. 

“Fair,” Kes said, “but now you need to spare manpower to watch him.”

“I believe we can turn that over to the local authorities soon enough,” Finn said. “In fact, now. They’ll hold this station; we can go to the next.”

He handed off his prisoner, and they climbed into a nondescript transport. “I’ll abide by your command on that,” Kes said, “but I’ve been burned by mercy, I don’t like taking prisoners.” They’d already established that Finn had time-in-rank seniority, and Kes lacked the depth of briefings Finn had. They were leapfrogging their way to where Poe was being held, and where they had good intelligence that the First Order’s officers would wind up for the official planet handover. Their actions here were disguised as generic low-level upheaval, with the true scope of the action kept hidden. 

Finn shook his head. “I won’t order you to do anything but follow your conscience,” he said. “ But understand that the First Order’s presence here is almost exclusively sympathizers, and not actual members of the organization.”

“I suppose this is a different war than the one I fought,” Kes said. “But, you know. I lost family on Alderaan, and I lost friends on Hosnia, so it all kind of feels the same.”

“Understandable,” Finn said. “That’s why I’m not making prisoners a matter of policy. I’m just pointing out how I see it.” 

He checked his comm. “Any direct reports of First Order presence?” Kes asked. 

Finn shook his head. “Nothing confirmed,” he said, “but Pava’s got her eye on the sky.”

 

________

  
  


“Holy fuck,” BB-8 said. 

“What,” Pava said, tearing her eyes away from the comm readout that was all the operatives’ chatter as they secured various bases. She was collating, compressing, and sending the data in bursts to the cruiser, to keep the transmissions as inconspicuous as possible. There were several small transports inbound that she was absolutely certain were First Order, so keeping the comms quiet was imperative. 

BB-8 scrolled back up the logs. “That weird X-Wing we were watching,” ey said. “With no astro?”

“Yeah,” Pava said, trying to follow the confused logs. 

“Fired up the burners and tried to crash into that First Order transport,” BB-8 said.

“Well, shit,” Pava said, “we weren’t trying to attract that kind of attention. Did he get it?”

“Nope,” BB-8 said. “It was on a collision course and then it stopped short in violation of all laws of physics. Now it’s locked to the transport.”

“Locked,” Pava said blankly. 

“Look,” B said, and manipulated the holoscreen so that the relevant portions of the log lit up. “I don’t know. Maybe the transport had a tractor beam.”

“That doesn’t— that model of transport wouldn’t be able to have any kind of equipment like that,” Pava said, baffled. 

B made a  _ search me _ kind of little noise, kind of a verbal shrug. “Well, that’s what’s happening,” ey said. 

“It can’t be,” Pava said. 

“Well, it is,” B said. 

 

______________

 

“This,” Kylo Ren intoned dramatically as he swept into some kind of room or other, “was the best the Resistance could do for you people?” 

Bolt was pretty sure he was dead. He was floating, there was just no other way to describe it. He couldn’t feel his legs. His helmet was still on his head, and it was mostly full of blood now, from his nose or maybe his mouth or, shit, maybe his eyes, he didn’t know anymore. 

“And then you tell us that you already have this man captured,” Kylo went on. “Perhaps that is how the Resistance plans to defeat us, by reviving the use of clones. But if that were the case, I would perhaps advise them to clone someone a little less brave and a little more tactically gifted than Poe Dameron. This one tried to ram us with an X-Wing. Hardly a sound strategy.”

Bolt had been letting his head loll, but he made a tiny attempt to hold it steady enough to get his bearings. It was some kind of room or other, sure enough. A nice room, with carpet and window-holoscreens and things. Chairs. Nice. Oh, maybe those were real windows, maybe they were really on a planet. He’d kind of been passed-out for that part, the landing and all; Kylo Ren had kind of reached in and shut his consciousness off, or maybe he’d just passed out. It was hard to tell. 

Kylo Ren floated Bolt over to the corner of the room, then unceremoniously dumped him. Bolt fell over, but he couldn’t really breathe like that, so he struggled and managed to get an arm under him and shove himself up against the wall, and kind of gave up there. He lost the thread of what was going on. Some lady was making all kinds of noises about how terrible it was that the Resistance had tried to sabotage this, it was all somebody or other’s fault, blah blah. 

Bolt was aware of motion; someone had picked him up and was carrying him, the normal way, with arms, although they weren’t human arms: he blinked in disoriented distress at the scales on the big arms holding him but he was kind of too far gone to figure out what the hell was going on, and then he was on the ground again, this time against a wall. He didn’t have the strength to stay upright, and he was slowly sliding down and that was a shame. He was pretty sure he was going to suffocate if he wound up lying flat, but he didn’t have any more fight in him.

At some point someone sat down next to Bolt, or was there one way or another; he only really noticed when the person next to him helped prop him up a little more upright, and then started working on releasing the catches of Bolt’s helmet. “Shit, buddy, you’re all blood, what did they do to you?” the person was saying, and slipped Bolt’s helmet off. 

“I’m just real sick,” Bolt managed between breaths. He was slurring his words pretty bad, it sounded like; probably the guy wouldn’t understand, but he felt like he had to try to say something anyway. “Sorry if I get blood on you.”

“That’s all right,” the person who was helping him said. “I’m not worried about it. Are you the other Poe Dameron?”

Bolt blinked, managing to get his eyes open. Had time passed? Time had passed. He’d been in this little room a while, maybe. “Lazy fuckers used the same trackers in me as him,” he said. “I’m not even sure who this Dameron guy is, but if it floats Fuckface’s boat I’ll wear whatever name tag he likes.”

The person’s face, staring down at him, crinkled up with amusement. It was a nice face, a sort of reassuring face, and there was something familiar about him, though Bolt couldn’t place it. “Fuckface,” the person said. 

“You know,” Bolt said. Without so much blood in his mouth he could talk better. His nose had stopped bleeding, maybe. He could have been out a little while. “With the stupid--  _ thing _ on his face. Like, we all wear helmets, but his is like. It’s just. The point of the helmets is they’re all the same. I mean. That’s what uniforms are about. His is, like. Super weird and stands out. So why does he bother?”

The person’s eyes squinted up when he laughed, which was just charming; there were crinkles in the skin around his eyes where it looked like his face must do that all the time. He must laugh a lot. Bolt didn’t see a lot of faces in his daily life. He’d been enjoying that during his time with the Resistance, seeing faces of people besides just officers. He liked this face. 

“Who are you?” the person asked. “I mean, you can’t really be Poe Dameron.”

“Why not?” Bolt asked. He was still sort of fuzzy on what was going on. At a time like this he actually missed the stimulants. Not just because withdrawal symptoms might yet kill him, but also because he knew shit was going down and he really ought to be aware for it. But being fuzzy-headed meant at least that he could ignore quite how sick he really was. “I could be. I never had a real name before, maybe I could just steal one.”

The person’s smile went a little crooked. “Are you— were you a Stormtrooper?”

“No,” Bolt said, offended, but then he deflated. To regular people there wasn’t really a difference. He scrunched his face up as he thought about it. “JN-4002,” he admitted, looking over toward the person’s chest, which was right next to his face. He’d hit his limit of eye contact, he couldn’t look at the guy’s face anymore, even though he liked it. “TIE pilot.” 

“Oh, wow,” the person said. “I flew one of those for like, five minutes. It was  _ awesome _ . They’re so fast!”

“Ha,” Bolt said, “I just flew an X-Wing for the first time, and it was like trying to fuck a liferaft down a trash chute without using your hands. I couldn’t even get the fucking thing pointed anywhere near where I wanted it to go.” 

The guy made a strangled snorting noise of amusement, then asked, “Is that why you’re wearing Arana’s flight suit?”

“Yeah,” Bolt said, and the knowledge went through him in a weird slow sideways way, hitting him at the base of the spine first; it took him palpable seconds to think it through, and he sucked in a breath and managed to drag his eyes back up to the guy’s face. “Are you the real Poe Dameron?”

The man had very, very dark eyes, irises nearly indistinguishable from pupil in this light, and they were shifting a little, slowly, side-to-side. Rhyndo. “Yeah,” he said. 

“Everyone kept saying I look like you,” Bolt said. He was so cold, and his limbs were so heavy. He really shouldn’t have subjected himself to zero-G like that, he was too ill to handle it. “But when it came down to it they couldn’t tell me from Arana when I snuck into this mission and pretended to have space sickness.”

“People have always confused me with Arana,” the person, who was Dameron, said, and his mouth was making a funny shape, a kind of soft smile. “Ever since we were at the Academy. We’ve fooled people before.” 

Bolt smiled, at that. “It’s easier to fool around with shit like that when everyone wears full-face helmets,” he said. He was having trouble focusing his eyes. “I was really surprised when it turned out to work with you guys.”

“Can you tell me why, though?” Dameron asked. “Why did you pretend to be Arana?”

“To spring the trap,” Bolt said. “Or figure out whatever the hell it was that Hux was trying to do here.” He was starting to have to think hard about breathing again. “I couldn’t figure it out so I tried to just kill him instead. I don’t know why. It seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Hey,” Dameron said, and maybe that expression was alarm. “Hey, kid, you don’t look so hot. Maybe don’t try to talk for a little while, save your strength.”

“No,” Bolt said. “No, I wanted to ask you— can I ask you just one— uh, or maybe it’s that I got to tell you—“

“Okay,” Dameron said. “Stay calm and still, okay? I won’t make you be quiet, but try to stay calm.”

Bolt nodded, and took a couple of breaths, steadying himself. He was so cold. It was like there was a weight on his chest keeping him from breathing right. “General Organa,” he got out. Dameron nodded, listening. “She said. She said you and I were related. That you’d know. Who my family was.”

Dameron’s face went soft and sad. “Oh, kid,” he said. “I mean. Kind of.”

“I said it wrong,” Bolt realized. “My people. Or… Something? Stone kings or something.”

“Yes,” Dameron said. “Oh, kid.”

“Are you my family?” Bolt asked.

“Kinda,” Dameron said. “Probably. Like a cousin or something. Close enough, kid. Hey, it’s all right. Do me a favor and just breathe a minute, okay? I got you, it’s okay.”

“For real, though?” Bolt asked. “Or are you just agreeing to shut me up?”

“No,” Dameron said, “for real, kid.”

“My friends call me Bolt,” Bolt said. 

“For real, Bolt,” Dameron said, and his smile was a sweet and gentle kind of thing, pleasant to look at. “I don’t know but I bet my auntie could figure out who your mother was. She knows the old magics. She could find out who your family was. She’d love to do that.”

“I don’t feel good,” Bolt whispered. It was an understatement. 

“Then just rest a minute,” Dameron said. “It’ll be okay. I got you. Just rest a minute.”

 

____________

  
  


Luke had his eyes closed, following the great inward-swooping presence of his nephew. He had a kind of magnetic effect, drawing everything in toward him and distorting it. It was a little like Darth Vader had been, at his strongest, but not really; Vader had been a Sith, with their disciplines and studies. Kylo Ren was not a Sith. He was a Dark Jedi. Where the Sith bent chaos to their will, Dark Jedis generally had no control over it, and while ostensibly the chaos was what they desired, in the end it normally destroyed them. Luke had a strong suspicion that self-destruction was Kylo Ren’s ultimate goal, but the problem was that it wasn’t his  _ immediate _ goal, and his immediate goals were a lot harder to anticipate and counter because of all the chaos. 

Kylo Ren’s chaos had an extremely magnetic effect on Rey, and it was clear he wanted nothing more than to drag her to him and consume her in some way. And she was bonded to him, to an extent. Letting the two of them fight was probably not a good idea. Most of Luke’s strength was being expended on keeping Rey hidden from Kylo. 

Fortunately, Kylo had no awareness at all of Finn. Finn’s presence was strong and sturdy, and not in the slightest affected by Kylo. The young man was aware of Kylo, on some level, but seemed utterly undisturbed by him. 

Rey, though, was almost ravenous in her desire to confront the Dark Jedi, and Luke was pretty concerned about what she’d do if she met him.

“Sir,” one of the Resistance soldiers said uneasily. Luke inhaled slowly, then opened one eye. “Sir, we need to move.”

“Understood,” Luke said. The plan was for him to use the Force to finesse the guards on the prison where the opposition party leader was being held. He probably was powerful enough. If not, the alternative plan was an ambush. Nothing wrong with some old-fashioned techniques now and then, if he couldn’t spare enough attention from his constant struggle to keep his former student and his current student from mutually-assured destruction. 

Even if he were certain, he thought, that Rey and Kylo could mutually annihilate one another, it still wasn’t worth it. Nothing was worth losing Rey. She was too precious, and also too important. 

“I’m not going to pull an Obi-Wan,” Luke said to the bemused soldier next to him. 

“Very good, sir,” the soldier said uncertainly.

“That was bullshit,” Luke informed him. “With the vanishing act and all. I’m not doing that.”

“... All right?” the soldier said. 

“It is all right,” Luke said. “Don’t worry about it.” He patted the soldier on the shoulder. “What’s her name again?”   
“Whose, sir?” 

“The Senator we’re rescuing,” Luke said.

“Amaria Hilant,” the soldier said. 

“Amaria Hilant,” Luke said, and collected what energy he could spare. “Are we ready?”

“Just waiting for you, sir,” the soldier said, more cheerfully. 

  
  


_____________

  
  


“Hey,” Poe said, leaning against the door. “Hey. Anybody! Can anybody hear me?”

The Shozer appeared, grimacing and gesturing. “Shh,” he said. “You gotta keep it down, man.”

“I’m pretty sure this kid is dying,” Poe said. They were in a weird little anteroom, kind of a coat closet he figured, with a decorative scrollwork door, and it was the dumbest prison cell he’d ever seen. He could hear that there was a large number of people nearby, in the big room down the hall probably with the horrible disorienting windows. Surely Kylo Ren was terrorizing them all, and normally he’d be all about not involving himself in that action, but the TIE pilot kid was bloodless under the pigment of his skin, lips bluish and eyes rolling back, classic severe space sickness organ failure kind of stuff, and if Poe never watched anyone die like that again it’d be too soon, let alone this sweet lost kid. 

He was definitely one of the Missing, too, clear as anything, and Norasol would be furious that she’d been wrong this whole time. She’d always believed they’d all been killed immediately, and apparently Poe’s grandmother, his father’s mother, had always believed they’d been stolen instead of massacred, and it had been one of the central mysteries of Poe’s young life, that endless debate; in Lita’s memory, Kes would never let it die, and he and Norasol fought about it so much it was kind of by rote.

(Poe was probably going to die here, and that sucked for many, many reasons, but having The Answer about The Missing was probably the most acute regret he was currently feeling. He was aware this was classic avoidance but it was true regardless.)

“I’m sorry,” the Shozer said, “but I don’t know what they did to him, I don’t have any way of helping him, and if we’re lucky, Kylo Ren is about to kill every one of us, so it doesn’t matter.”

“If we’re unlucky?” Poe prompted, wondering how much this guy knew.

“That’s outside my pay grade,” the Shozer said grimly. 

“I mean it, though,” Poe said. “This kid has like. An hour tops.”

“We’re all doomed,” the Shozer said. 

“A premature pronouncement,” someone intoned from farther down the hallway, and the Shozer swung around in alarm. Poe craned his neck to see, but he already knew it was Kylo Ren. A glimpse of a looming black shape was enough to convince him. He scrambled back across the little room and propped Bolt back up, since the boy was sliding down the wall with the effort of drawing his labored breaths, and waited. 

“Leave us,” Kylo said, and the Shozer scurried, insofar as a creature of his size could, away down the hall. The knight took up a stance in the doorway, and without touching it, swung the door-grate open so he stood unimpeded in it.

Poe composed himself and looked up, not bothering to try to keep his gaze steady. 

“Can you tell which one of us is which now?” Poe asked. 

“She should not have suppressed your trackers,” Kylo said. “Now I know that she is here.”

“That’s how you got us confused, huh?” Poe asked. He wished Bolt was conscious, but it was a stupid thing to wish for. And if Rey was suppressing his trackers, then he was supposed to be here. That meant she’d put him here on purpose. He didn’t really want to think about that. 

“It is fascinating,” Kylo said, “how similar your minds taste. You have an odd resonance with this one. You’ll be pleased to know, I think, that he was present on Starkiller and personally killed several of your friends.”

“Fortunes of war,” Poe said. “You think that’ll upset me?”

“No,” Kylo said, “I meant it, you’re pleased to be able to forgive him. You always were a little tedious about that sort of thing, Dameron.”

Bolt gasped in a breath and said, “Yo, Dameron, did you really fuck Hux? Because Kylo’s jealous.”

It astonished Poe into laughing. “It was like a million years ago,” Poe said. “He still remembers that?”

“He felt the need to tell me, for some reason,” Kylo said. “As if it were somehow notable that I would have failed to extract that from your mind in an interrogation that wasn’t about that at all. JN-4002, your priorities also leave much to be desired; why did you literally kill yourself just to come here and bait me?”

“Consolation prize,” Bolt said, and that was about as much as he could manage to say. His lungs were filling with fluid, Poe thought. Something like that. It would kill him pretty soon; it was pretty ballsy of the kid to still be trying to talk. 

Kylo put his hand out, and Poe flinched, but it was Bolt who went rigid and made an awful little choking noise. There was no point pleading for him, so Poe didn’t, he just held onto him as he struggled weakly. 

“You’re not going to do something stupid and self-sacrificing?” Kylo asked after a moment. Bolt twitched violently, head snapping back as he tried to breathe. Poe hung onto him, arms around his chest. 

“I know the difference between a forlorn hope and total futility,” Poe said. “But, I mean, if you really insist. Tell me, did you eat Ben, or is he still in there under that mask and all that?”

“ _ That’s _ the Dameron I know,” Kylo said. He curled his fingers, and Bolt sat up sharply, fingers wrapping around Poe’s arms. Bolt inhaled, deeply, and then started to cough. Poe hung on grimly.    
He felt the pressure, as Kylo’s attention shifted away from Bolt and towards him. It was just like he’d felt on the Finalizer, a deep cold pressure like wind on the leeward side of a mountain, turbulent and chaotic and destructive and inexorable. Poe scrambled to get a good handhold on something, a memory or a certainty or something, but his mind was such an emptied wreck that nothing easily came to hand. He turned up a fragment of Rey’s hand, of Finn’s grin, and then he was into childhood stuff, and he closed his mental grasp around the perfect thing.

Kylo loomed inward toward him, and he threw the memory with all his might:

The community center on Yavin 4, with the salvaged stained-glass window and the earnest singing master, a Yavallan refugee. Little Ben, surly and shy and hard to talk to, entrusted in Poe’s care, and Poe so deeply impressed by the importance of his task, by the importance of their visitors; he’d brought Ben along to the youth singing practice, and the choirmaster had drawn Ben out of his shell, had praised his participation, and it was the happiest Poe had ever seen the kid look, singing along to the old Yavallan hymn with the droning part-singing harmonies.

_ O bear me away on your snow-white wings to my immortal home _

_ O bear me away on your snow-white wings to my immortal home _

The pressure grew, suddenly enough to drown out the singing, and the delight in Ben’s eyes the first time he’d figured out how harmony worked. 

_ I didn’t eat Ben, _ Kylo’s mind offered, into the ringing silence.  _ He built me, to protect him, when you failed. _

_ I would have done anything, _ Poe said, and then he couldn’t think at all, not in words.

_ Oh, _ Kylo said absently,  _ it wasn’t just you, don’t take it so personally. _

The pressure tore him out of his body and he was nothing, and Kylo was shuffling through him like a deck of cards, rummaging through his guts like you’d rummage through a junk drawer, spreading him all out and looking at all of it. 

_ Where is everything _ , Kylo said, almost mildly.  _ How did you get to this planet? Where have you been for the last month? _

There was no answer for that. Clearly Kylo could see that himself.  _ You cannot hide from me _ , Kylo said, and rummaged more, and it hurt now, a lot, but Poe was past caring. 

He was thinking about Bolt drowning in his own malfunctioning lungs; the kid couldn’t have been more than 25, he’d’ve been born in captivity after the fall of the Empire. No connection there to any family; had the Missing been sold wholesale to the First Order or were they dispersed now?

_ You truly don’t remember _ , Kylo realized, after some indeterminate period of rummaging. 

Oh, yeah; how had he gotten to this planet? He had no idea, he wasn’t hiding anything. 

_ Rhyndo causes brain damage _ , Poe answered him, the ideas collecting from across the wide expanse of what had been his mind-- nothing so formal as words, he was past that, but there was still enough to cohere an idea and push it out. 

And he felt the reaction to that: Kylo rejected it, but there was doubt. He hadn’t researched rhyndo that thoroughly. He had seen what it did, and had seen how afraid Poe was of it, but he had not gone further, to see how long a man could live with it, to find out if it emptied a man’s head as it stole his abilities. 

Maybe that really was what had happened. Poe had been hoping, so secretly he’d kept it even from himself, that perhaps this was part of some plan, perhaps he’d agreed to-- whatever was happening, here-- perhaps his allies had prepared him in some way for this. But no. It was just that his survival instincts had gotten him this far even though there was basically no point. He was only here to serve as a sacrificial plea for mercy on behalf of this planet he’d never been to before and didn’t remember anything of except maybe an hour in a basement, and a duty-bound but kind escort down a hallway. 

Nobody was coming for him. He was alone, now, here at the end.

Next to a dying boy who’d never known who he came from. It was, maybe, fitting? No, that wasn’t the word. 

At any rate. Not really alone. A consolation, perhaps. 

Kylo expanded and took up all the remaining space in Poe’s echoing, empty head, and Poe’s last thought as such was a kind of relief that at least he didn’t have to wait any longer in dread.

  
  


______________

  
  


Leia stood composedly before the broadcast apparatus, with Util’s opposition party representative next to her. Amaria Hilant was the runner-up to the New Republican Senate position, and had been imprisoned under false pretenses not long before. Hilant had been somewhat mistreated in prison, but she had come straight here for the broadcast following Luke’s low-key, undramatic rescue of her, and was managing to stand unassisted largely through sheer force of will. Leia could respect that. 

The light came on, and Leia raised her head slightly. Amaria had asked her to speak first. “Greetings, citizens of Util. I am General Leia Organa of the Resistance. As some of you may know, your Senator Juxik has promised this planet to the First Order, in the face of considerable popular opposition. In the absence of any real ability by the remnants of the New Republic to defend this planet, the Resistance has stepped in. I am here, on your planet, with your opposition party leader, Amaria Hilant. She was unjustly imprisoned, and we have freed her. Together, we will resist the handover of power to the First Order. Such things should be decided by democratic vote, and the people have spoken against it.”

Leia paused, and extended her arm so that Amaria could take it. The other woman did so, and leaned heavily on her. “I will not see my people subsumed into slavery under an imitation Empire,” Amaria said hoarsely, and then faltered and fell silent. She squeezed Leia’s arm tightly, and Leia nodded slightly, then spoke again. 

“The Resistance has come in considerable force,” she said, “and we will not abandon you to the First Order’s revenge. We destroyed their planet-killing weapon, and we will stand firm against them here. We ask you for your help. We have seized strategic points throughout the planet, key points of infrastructure and the like. Help us defend them. We will not see them destroyed, we will not see you subjugated by brute force. We have a cruiser in orbit and a squadron of starfighters. But we have no desire to control you in our turn, and when we are confident that the planet is safe from the First Order, we will leave you in peace to self-determine once more.”

A headache was growing, sudden and piercing, behind her right eye. She knew it was a disturbance in the Force. She knew it was her son. She had a horrible feeling. She kept her expression calm and determined until the light shut off, signaling the end of the broadcast, and then she let her put her hand to her head and close her eyes. 

“General,” an aide said, hurrying forward. She opened her eyes and transferred Amaria’s arms to the aide’s grasp.

“Help her,” she said, “I am all right,” and waited until they had turned away to put her hand to her face again. 

The vivid image of Ben, aged about five, smiling shyly up at someone came into her mind. Another child was speaking, in a sweet little lisping voice,  _ “C’mon, she’s always got snacks!” _

Poe’s voice; he’d had a terrible lisp when his front teeth were missing. 

It was a memory of Poe’s, and she was seeing it because, surely, he had pushed it at Ben, who was repeating it. Rejecting it. She sucked in a breath, and found that another aide had appeared with a chair. 

“General,” the aide said. 

“M-my operative,” she said, and sat. “Oh no. Oh, no.” She could hear the song, then, the sweet little Yavallan hymn they’d sung at the community festival. It wasn’t just Poe’s memory, now, it was Ben’s too, she could tell he was remembering it. And then suddenly it snuffed out, as if someone had closed a fist around it. 

“What is happening?” It was Amaria’s second-in-command, who’d been at the top level of the on-planet Resistance cell, bending anxiously at her elbow. 

“Give me a moment,” Leia said, and she focused and could see it, could make out Poe’s presence in the Force, could see him splayed out and helpless. “No,” she said, but there was nothing she could do to protect him.

Poe was one person, and he had volunteered for this. 

_ He’ll die for you, one day _ , Kalonia spat bitterly in Leia’s memory, and Leia pressed her hands over her eyes and watched the dark, malevolent rage of what used to be her son flare up into a bitter maelstrom. 

It had really been a foolish hope, that Finn and Kes could get there in time.

  
  


____________

  
  


_ O bear me away on your snow-white wings to my immortal home _

Finn was humming a song, and it was only when Kes looked over at him sort of sharply that he noticed he was humming. “You are taking  _ act casual _ too far,” Kes said. “And I hate that song, why do you know it?”

Finn brought himself up short. They were making their way across the city in the open, because it was raining so no one would remark on the hoods they were wearing, the bulky coats that were concealing their weaponry. “I _ don’t  _ know that song,” Finn said. He frowned. “Was it playing somewhere?”

Kes turned and looked at him, pushing his hood back a little and frowning. “No,” he said. “It’s not-- the kind of thing you’d hear in a holo.” 

Finn concentrated for a moment. He was still new at this, still forgot how to focus his mind, but he caught a snatch of it again, distantly. Kes was right, it wasn’t out loud. “Children are singing it,” he said, baffled. It had to be a Force-user projecting the impression somehow, but he hadn’t even begun to come close to understanding how any of that truly worked. All he’d really learned was basic, practical stuff-- how to resist, how to push back, how to listen. Not why, not how. 

Kes’s expression set into blankness. “Poe and Ben sang that song together in a choir,” he said, “when they were little kids. How can you hear it now?”

“I don’t know,” Finn said. 

“Fuck,” Kes said. “You’re Force-sensitive.”

“Oh,” Finn said, “right.”

“Well,” Kes said. “Then you’re getting it from Ben, which is a problem, because he’s probably getting it from Poe, and he wouldn’t be rummaging around in there for any  _ good _ reason.” They were making for the Senator’s house, a big modern chrome-and-transparisteel building that hulked over the beautiful view of the river that marked a boundary of the city. They knew Poe was there, they knew the Senator was hosting the First Order there, and they had the layout of the place and its staffing, and they had several operatives in it, and that was the extent of their plan. 

“I’m not good at this Force stuff yet,” Finn groused, as they put on speed.

“So you’re more like Organa than Skywalker,” Kes said. “She never moved stuff or mind-bended anybody, but she just knew stuff and heard things. That kind of thing.”

“Maybe?” Finn said. “I only found out kinda recently.” The wind gusted, blowing rain straight into his face, and he wiped at it in disgust; weather like this was about the only time he missed the damn helmet. “I wasn’t exactly encouraged toward that kinda introspection back at my old job, y’know?”

“True,” Kes said. 

A sudden jolt of distress made Finn stagger, and Kes grabbed his arm to steady him. “No,” Finn said, horrified, but he didn’t know why. 

“What,” Kes said, staring at him. “What is it?”

Finn shook his head slightly. It wasn’t his own distress. He was feeling someone else’s. It wasn’t clear, wasn’t specific enough for him to narrow it down. “We gotta keep going,” he said, fighting how it made his heart beat unevenly. Was it Rey? Was it Luke? Someone was projecting. 

_ It’s Kylo _ , Rey’s thought-voice said, very quietly, across the back of his mind; she was distressed too.  _ Either he’s onto us, or he’s killing Poe, I can’t tell, maybe both, _ and then she was gone again, shielded from him, and the silence rang deafeningly.

“Fuck,” Finn said, “c’mon, we got no time to lose.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I observed on Tumblr, it took almost literally all I had to avoid directly quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the opening scene.   
> "He says he's already got one!"


	7. The Crossing Must Be Near

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Featuring Jess Pava: Action Hero Actress, some truly terrible Space Spanish on purpose, and the long-awaited Dameron reunion. (Title is more lyrics from the song from last chapter, and not at all me complaining that I thought this story would be done by now.)

“I can’t believe,” Jess said, out loud but to herself, “I let an astromech droid talk me into a suicide mission.”

“No time for whining,” BB-8 said, darting across an open area of the landing pad. Jess gritted her teeth and followed em at a more sedate, non-suspicion-raising pace, her astromech R4-F2 trundling hesitantly along behind her at his typical slow roll. She was wearing plain coveralls and carrying a datapad and trying to look like she was supposed to be here, and definitely not letting herself doubt whether abandoning her post to follow a possibly-insane astromech droid had been a good idea.

“I’m not whining,” Jess said. “I’m just saying, B, that maybe having Poe as your pilot has skewed your idea of what most people consider acceptable risk.”

“He did have a faulty self-preservation protocol,” BB-8 mused, trundling slowly along in the shadow of a big freighter. “I did what I could to mitigate it but he was certainly overdue for correction. It’s too bad you can’t correct humans.”

“You really can’t,” Jess said. She pretended to be consulting her datapad as she scoped out the scene in the landing area. The First Order transport, the first one that had landed-- the one the rogue X-Wing had tried to slam into-- was in a berth across the way. “Shit, they’ve posted a guard.”

Of course they had; a pair of Stormtroopers were standing motionless at the foot of the lowered ramp. The X-Wing in question was parked somewhat haphazardly next to the transport, canopy open. It was one of the Blue Squadron X-Wings, but Jess couldn’t make out any more of the markings to narrow it down to whose craft it was.

“Here’s the plan,” BB-8 said. “I malfunction, and you chase me.”

“That’ll attract attention,” Jess protested. Her spine tingled at the very thought of those Stormtroopers looking too attentively at her.

“Yes,” BB-8 said patiently, “it will. But they’ll assume they know what we’re doing.”

“You won’t be able to go anywhere unremarked,” Jess said.

R4 trundled up behind her, catching up. “I’ll go,” he beeped. “I can very easily simulate a malfunctioning limb. You can chase me, and while we are distracting them, BB-8 can slip onboard.”

“They’ll detain me,” Jess said.

“There’s no bounty on you,” BB-8 said. “And if everything else goes according to plan, then they won’t have time to worry about you.”

Jess breathed in slowly, then let it out in a gusty sigh. “Fine,” she said. “Are you sure, R4?” He’d never known how to dissemble, that she’d ever known.

“I can do it,” R4 said. He rotated his upper sensor array in what might have been self-consciousness. “I sometimes pretend that my left limb is malfunctioning more than it is, because I do not like the mud. Now, I could pretend that it is rolling and I cannot stop it and can only try to steer around, and I am too stupid to tip over like I would if that really happened.”

Jess thought about being scandalized at this revelation, but instead she just shook her head slightly. “You could just tell me you don’t like the mud, buddy,” she said. “But ok. I’ll play the flustered technician, you roll around.” She brought up her datapad, intending to sketch out a route or something.

R4 let out a horrifying squeal and took off, lurching wildly toward the transport. “Fuck,” Jess said, caught flat-footed. So much for planning.

She took off running, zig-zagging after R4’s eccentric trajectory. “HELP,” R4 bleated in Binary, “DISTRESS, MALFUNCTION.”

“Shit,” Jess said out loud, “shit shit piece of shit shit,” and realized that R4 had been deliberately holding back the entire time she’d known him. He was really trucking now, faster than she could run.

“Is there a problem, ma’am?” One of the Stormtroopers approached her at a jog, blaster holstered.

“My R-unit,” she said, feigning breathlessness. “Bad-- gimbal-- it can’t stop, it can only steer-- can you help me corral it up against that X-Wing, I bet we can get it tipped over--”

It worked like a charm. The other Stormtrooper was hesitant to abandon his-- her, Jess realized when she spoke-- post, emoting reluctance all over and making the hand-signal for “crazy”, but R4’s performance was so convincing, and Jess flattered herself her own performance so amusing, that she eventually did join them in attempting to corral the runaway astromech. BB-8 had rolled around bleating in distress for a few minutes, but Jess noticed ey’d stopped following them and was unobtrusively making eir way to the transport.

Another Stormtrooper came down the ramp. “What is going on out here?”

R4 whizzed by, with the male Stormtrooper getting between him and the ramp waving his arms to deflect the astromech. BB-8 took advantage of the roll-by to squeal dramatically and zoom for cover, diving under the ramp. “Tip over, R4!” Jess yelled breathlessly. “Just tip over! It’ll stop if you just tip over!”

“HELP,” R4 screamed, “DISTRESS, MALFUNCTION!”

“Get between him and that freighter,” the female Stormtrooper said.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” the Stormtrooper on the ramp said.

“I’m sorryyyy,” Jess wailed, “I thought I fixed it!” She’d yanked her hair tie out and was making much of trying to scrape her loose hair out of her face as she ran. One boot had come untied and she was exaggerating the flopping of her shoelace as she ran clumsily, waving her arms.  

Various harbor employees had started to come out of the woodwork, freight loaders from the cargo ships nearby. A pair of dockworkers yelled to one another in what Jess was startled to recognize was Iberican. She veered from her path and ran toward one of them, a small dark-haired woman with close-cropped hair and a tattoo across one cheekbone, black ink scrawled in an intricate sigil.

“Fronteras?” she asked quietly.

The woman looked startled. “Yes,” she answered in Basic.

“Ustedes odian el First Order?” Jess asked, speaking her clumsy-but-accurate Academy-trained Iberican. _You hate the First Order_ , she’d hopefully asked. She knew they did; Fronteras considered the First Order a particularly odious rival, just another Outer Rim gang too big for its britches, and had clashed bitterly with them. They were almost always Resistance-friendly. Most importantly, though, Stormtroopers didn’t study Iberican, she knew that for sure.

“Por supuesto,” the woman said darkly. _Of course_.

“Ayudame distraer ellos troopers,” Jess said, _help me distract those troopers_ , or hopefully something close enough, “mi otro astromeca va a entrar el transport y hacer sabotage!” That had probably been gibberish but hopefully conveyed something.

“Esta con la Resistencia?” the woman asked, face lighting up.

“Sí,” Jess answered, “yo soy.” She was pretty sure that was the right version of _I am_. Iberican had two verbs where Basic had one, and one was for permanent conditions and the other was for temporary situations and she wasn’t sure which one was correct for a political affiliation. Hopefully she hadn’t just implied she was made out of Resistance, or something.

“Awesome,” the woman said, because of course her Basic was perfect, “we were just about to do something stupid.” She turned and shouted toward her coworker. “Palo! Ven aca!”

“I’m going to try to corral the runaway astro toward the X-Wing-- he’s faking it,” Jess said, abandoning her terrible gibberish attempts; the Stormtroopers were out of earshot now anyway.

“Got it,” the woman said, and took off running toward her coworker.

Jess turned, but BB-8 had moved from the base of the ramp, and she couldn’t see em anywhere. She had to hope ey’d gotten on, or was safely hidden waiting for a further distraction. No more time for looking. She flung her hands up and galloped off as ridiculously as possible, boot flapping, to chase R4 some more.

 

________

 

Poe opened his eyes, or maybe they were already open. He was in a white room. It was an enormous white room, with no visible walls, well-lit by diffuse light from no discernable source. He was kneeling but not aware of his own weight on his knees. There was no pain. There was no sensation.

There was a man standing at a moderate distance from him, conversational distance, not looming. The man was big, but human-sized big; lean with broad shoulders, a substantial man. Dark hair. A long angular face, pale skin. Familiar.

Poe stared at him, since he was the only thing in the room. He was dead, or dreaming, that was obvious, but he couldn’t really remember how he’d died or when he’d fallen asleep. Only that his body was surprised not to be in pain.

And it came to him then that he knew that man. He’d never seen him before, not his face, not as a man. No. Only as a boy. That was Ben Organa, or who Ben had grown up to be-- a tall man, bigger than his father but lean-built like him, with broad shoulders that spoke of athletic activity. He had a swordsman’s stance, forward on the balls of his feet, and he was watching Poe calmly, patiently, without any sense of threat.

“You’re not Ben,” Poe said, realizing that he had the capacity of speech, here.

“No,” the man said, but his voice was calm and low, and his expression didn’t change. He had his arms down by his sides, and his hands were empty. “I outgrew that name, and they tried to make a box for me out of it, but I didn’t fit.”

“You were outgrowing that name when I knew you,” Poe said, realizing that it was true.

“We didn’t have the words for it,” not-Ben said. “We were just children.” He looked a little sad, but not wistful.

“I knew I couldn’t protect you,” Poe said. “I knew there was nothing I could do.”

“But you tried anyway,” not-Ben said. “You were a child, Poe. It was ridiculous for you to expect yourself to be able to do anything.”

“They told me to take care of you,” Poe said. He remembered his panic, as a child, his utter paralyzing dread of upsetting the fragile little boy they kept putting him in charge of. He’d usually been the oldest kid in any crowd, on Yavin 4, so he’d been de facto in charge of a lot of kids a lot of the time, and he’d usually been pretty good at it, but none of his tricks had worked well on Ben, and it had almost invariably ended in disaster one way or another.

He’d liked Ben, but he’d dreaded being left alone with him, by the end. “I had to try.”

“You thought that if you failed you’d be rejected,” not-Ben said.

The feeling came back, crushingly intense. Poe couldn’t breathe. He’d forgotten that, exactly, but it was completely true. He’d always had this belief, deep down, that if he didn’t live up to some vague idea of perfection, he’d be rejected. And, well, it had happened. “I was,” Poe said. “Eventually.”

“So I see,” not-Ben said. “The Resistance has abandoned you to me. For a second time. They weren’t going to come get you last time either.”

“No,” Poe said. “They weren’t.”

“Perhaps some miracle will save you this time, too,” not-Ben said. He wasn’t taunting, wasn’t cruel, wasn’t gloating over this. He was perfectly neutral, perhaps a little sad. His voice was sweeter, without the helmet’s unnecessary filtering. “Or, perhaps I will.”

“You’re still the same person,” Poe said, wondering. “I thought you-- I thought you were something else, that killed Ben and took over. But you’re. Not?”

“No,” not-Ben said. “I am all one person. But I killed Ben, because I had to be free of him in order to grow into anything at all. He was a frightened child, and a grown man can’t live like that.”

“She,” Poe said, because he couldn’t think of a name or title for her, “she thinks you were taken over by a-- by--” He couldn’t say the name, like there was some pressure on his tongue.

“I wasn’t,” not-Ben said. “Not like that. I don’t expect you to understand it.”

“What are we doing?” Poe asked. “What is this? Am I dead? Are you killing me, now?”

“A component of my advancement,” not-Ben said carefully, “has been the use of destruction and the absorption of energy. But recent events have made me doubt that my personal path to the fulfillment of potential lies along that route so exclusively. I have no orders concerning you, and so I am trying... something else.”

Poe had a vague feeling that he ought to be terrified by that, but he didn’t have it in him. Perhaps this wasn’t real enough to allow him that full a scope of emotion. Or perhaps he just couldn’t understand it well enough. “What are you trying?” he asked.

“Well,” not-Ben said. “I had planned to strip all the knowledge I could from your mind, and then destroy you, but it seems someone has beaten me to it.”

“What do you mean?” Poe asked.

“Some other Force user has been in here,” not-Ben said, gesturing around the empty white room. “They have done a fairly clumsy job of trying to repair you, so they clearly weren’t intending to destroy you, but it almost would have been kinder to do so. They have pulled out memories, presumably anything sensitive that you had in your mind-- including the current location of the main Resistance base, which I actually already know, by the way-- but also indiscriminately anything recent. It’s very untidy, but they didn’t want you to know what they’d done.”

Poe had assumed his disorientation was from the rhyndo. “Some Force user,” he said.

“Well,” not-Ben said. “It must be the girl. Rey. You have a lot of scraps of memories of her but nothing direct. If it were Skywalker, I would know. Although he had a hand in it. He is here, hiding from me.”

“I saw Luke,” Poe reflected; there was a fragment of that, Luke’s metal hand on his chest.

Not-Ben nodded slightly. “He might be better to teach her than he was to teach me,” he said, “but he was so frightened of me. I don’t expect you to understand. But I see, now, that there are far more useful things I can do with you than destroy you, and I can gain far more from the experience.”

“What does that mean that I should do?” Poe asked.

“You were never afraid of me,” not-Ben said. “Not before our last meeting, when I did you so much damage.”

“No,” Poe said. “I was afraid a lot, as a kid, but not of Ben.”

“You were afraid for Ben,” not-Ben said. “I did understand that, at the time. And whether you knew it or not, I was grateful for the distinction.”

“I wanted to protect you,” Poe said. “Not just because they told me I had to. I did like you sometimes. You were hard to like.”

“You never really liked me, but you loved me,” not-Ben said. “You weren’t the only one who did. I did understand that. My mother thinks I didn’t, but I did. Children aren’t stupid. But they want us to believe that love is unconditional, when it very clearly isn’t.”

“It never is,” Poe said, and he did have some capacity for emotion, because it came out angry. “It never is. Everyone wants to promise they’ll love you no matter what but it’s never true, and it takes so little to prove it.”

“Conventional morality forbids us from examining too closely that gap between what is said and what is meant,” not-Ben said, sad and serene. “And there is no room in most of the conventional Light Side education to explore this. The Force is not inherently moral, and trying to force such a framework on it is bound for failure.”

“I don’t know anything about any of it,” Poe confessed, a little wrung-out; it was hard to feel emotions here, he had realized. Wherever they were. Whenever they were.

“We’re meditating,” not-Ben said. “Don’t worry, we’re largely outside time; I’ve been working in here for an approximate eternity, and it doesn’t matter. None of it needs to concern you. Listen to me. I have to give you information. I took information, last time, and I’m balancing that now, since our abuse of you has left you such a blank slate.”

“What could you possibly tell me that I’ll understand?” Poe asked. “I have the Force sensitivity of a duracrete block, and what learning capacity I ever had is entirely stuffed full of guitar tabs and starfighter specifications.”

“Whether you’re able to control it or not, everyone is in the Force the same amount,” not-Ben said, and there was a tiny spark that could have been amusement. In that moment he looked like his old self, and it didn’t make Poe sentimental but it solidified his belief that this was somehow real. “I can give you this information, you’re sentient, that’s all that’s required.”

“Oh,” Poe said, “I’m sentient, how generous of you.”

“Shut it, Dameron,” not-Ben said, and cracked an actual smile, heavy eyebrow quirking a little. “The creature that I was loved you back, you know. Listen to me,” and he grew serious again, intense. “The girl is not the only one who is Force-sensitive. The traitor is too, the former Stormtrooper: he is perhaps less powerful than she is, or perhaps is still developing. If Skywalker tries to train them as he did me, they will fail. They must face me and confront me. I will destroy them and myself, if Skywalker does not open his mind and allow them to grow as they must.”

“Oh,” Poe said, and it resonated somewhere in his center; he understood it and it was true. Finn was strong in the Force, and he was nearby.

“He is nearby,” not-Ben confirmed. “He has come-- not to save you, but to use your sacrifice to distract me. We are outside time, here, but we still may have to cut this short. Let me explain this to you. Skywalker could not teach me, and I do not believe he will be able to teach the girl. There is more that is needed. She and the Stormtrooper must stick together. Skywalker may try to separate them and she must not allow that. We are in a post-Jedi era.”

The words were a surface of meaning, but there were deeper things moving into Poe’s mind, flowing into the empty white walls, filling in spaces and smoothing over hollows and changing everything from blank white to-- something else, outside the visible spectrum. “It’s not about me,” not-Ben said. “Who or what I am does not matter.”

“How do I tell them this?” Poe asked. “I can’t understand your message, how am I supposed to pass it on?”

“Release yourself from worry,” not-Ben said. “The message can travel through you without you needing to understand it, or even coherently remember it. Your mind is a shambles and your memory an echoing cave. I will leave you in better condition than I found you, and if the girl is worthy of the message she will understand it.”

“Will it harm her?” Poe asked, a tiny niggling worry coming up through the resonance of correctness that was otherwise completely suffusing him.

“There is no true meaning in the words you mean for these concepts,” not-Ben said. “Good, evil. Harm. Wrong. Right.” He raised his hand, turning it palm-upward, and gesturing outward to the side, a throwing-away gesture. “You love her, do you not? You don’t remember why, but the emotion is there. You probably let her do this to you, willingly opened your mind to her destruction, because you loved her.”

Poe considered that a moment. But there was nothing in his mind to grab onto, and he could not pin down more than a vague desperate longing for her. He could not have spent more than a handful of moments in her presence; it was absurd to suggest that he could have anything more than a mild disposition of kindness toward her, because his astromech liked her so much. Not-Ben had a point.

“Love is good, isn’t it?” not-Ben went on. “But love has destroyed you more than any other force in the universe. How can something good be destructive? Because the nature of good is fundamentally a misapprehension of reality.”

“Okay,” Poe said, dragging himself back to the actual point at hand, “but are you laying some kind of trap in my mind so that she’ll get hurt?”

Not-Ben smiled again, but sadly this time, not amused. “Not exactly,” he said. He nodded very slightly. “Your pragmatism is admirable even in extremity.”

“I’m sort of resigned to dying,” Poe said, “and probably horribly, I came here expecting that, but I’m not going to improbably survive this only to bring down my own organization from the inside. Maybe I loved you, but I haven’t forgotten you’re a monster now.” It was hard to say.

“That is not my plan,” Not-Ben said. “Everyone thinks the girl and I are destined to destroy one another but I think there must be another way.”

“Don’t want to be destroyed?” Poe asked. “I can empathize.”

“It’s not that,” not-Ben said. “I am prepared for that. Everything is eventually destroyed. I am disinterested in power for its own sake. Destruction releases power, but there is more that could be accomplished.”

Poe understood, then, though he wasn’t sure what he understood. The room faded out, not-Ben watching him serenely as he faded out too, and he blinked vaguely, uncertainly at what proved itself to be a ceiling. Something was-- everything hurt, his head most of all, his knees hurt, he was cold but someone was-- something soft had him-- he was being held in someone’s arms. Someone had their face pressed against the side of his face and he could see their head, close-cropped hair, black laced with gray. They pulled back a little, looking up and away from him, and he stared in disbelief.

It looked like his father. His father, holding him in his arms, sitting on the floor to hold him, he was indoors, somewhere, in a hallway maybe, and it really looked like Kes Dameron, looking up at someone, grim and upset and determined.

“Papa,” Poe said, because it hurt too much to think clearly or try to analyze the situation. It couldn’t be Kes, it just couldn’t, but as he said it, Kes looked down sharply and saw him and his expression changed, softened, twisted to worry.

“My baby boy,” Kes said. “I’m sorry, my baby boy.”

“It hurts me,” Poe said, confused, because everything did hurt and he didn’t know what to make of it.

“I’m sorry,” Kes said. “I’m sorry.”

Poe squinted up at Kes, trying to wrap his mind around how this could possibly, possibly really be his father-- but it looked like him, it sounded like him, hell it even smelled like him, damp from rain but sweet-tangy with the ozone and sunshine of Yavin 4. There was no way-- His head hurt, so badly, so badly, and he slid into unconsciousness before he could finish the thought.

  


______________________

  
  
  


Bolt sat up before he was even aware of what he was doing. He was in a little room. He was. Somewhere. Someone had just fired a blaster. His nose was wet. He wiped it, and his hand came away bloody, and he coughed and for some reason it surprised him when it didn’t hurt.

He scrambled to his feet, his whole body thrumming with a feeling of urgency. Something was-- was wrong? He staggered, caught himself against the wall, turned to look back into the room.

Kylo Ren was standing in the doorway, looming, weirdly motionless. Bolt scrambled backward, barely keeping his feet. “Fuck,” he gasped, when Kylo did not react to him. Was-- was the knight in a trance?

He was staring at the crumpled form on the floor-- a man, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Bolt remembered that he himself had definitely been dying not that long ago. He’d been lying propped against that guy, who was maybe dead now.

There was yelling, and running feet, somewhere out in the building they were in. Bolt hesitated. Should he just-- push his way past Kylo Ren and run for it? Should he try to defend this guy, who had been kind to him and was related to him and was-- fuck, maybe Kylo was mind-melding with him and sucking out his brain or something, what could Bolt even do about that?

Feet in the corridor. Bolt flattened himself against the wall, at bay, trapped, as someone appeared at Kylo’s shoulder in the doorway. A man, officer’s uniform. “Ren,” the man said.

It was definitely, definitely General Hux, and Bolt had definitely tried to kill the guy, and he’d come here to talk to him but now the man had seen him and was staring at him in bafflement.

“Nobody’s moving,” Bolt said, mouth moving before his brain caught up. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

Hux stepped past Kylo Ren’s shoulder into the room, and frowned at Bolt, then down at the crumpled form of the guy on the floor. “Oh how uncanny,” he said, “you resemble him, but-- _that_ ’s Poe Dameron.” His frown deepened. “Who are you?”

“JN-4002,” Bolt said.

“Ah,” Hux said with an air of dawning comprehension. “I had wondered if he’d used those tracking devices anywhere else. That’s it, isn’t it? You have the same Force trackers as Dameron. So he couldn’t tell you apart.” Hux shook his head slightly, coolly amused. “Typical.”

“Why did you send us to fail?” Bolt asked, recovering enough courage to get the words out. “Just to see what Organa did to us?”

Hux tilted his head. “Well, what _did_ she do to you?”

“She was nice to us,” Bolt said.

Hux nodded slightly. “As I rather suspected,” he said. “Well, it may be immaterial, Leader Snoke wouldn’t allow a truce, but I wanted to see if it was at least possible. It’s hard to get a read on these kinds of things, from within the beast.” He reached over and smacked the back of his hand against Ren’s shoulder. “Whatever you’re doing, I suggest you stop, they’ve come to ambush us in more force than we prepared for.”

Ren snapped suddenly into motion, whirling in a flurry of robes to confront Hux, who was improbably unmoved by it, doing nothing more than rocking back slightly onto his heels, eyebrows going up. “Skywalker is here,” Ren intoned.

“Yes,” Hux said, “so you said.”

“No,” Kylo said, “I mean, he is in this building.”

“Yes well,” Hux said. “Do as you please, but I intend to evacuate.”

“You didn’t figure on an ambush on this planet,” Bolt filled in shrewdly.

Kylo Ren was still again, one hand absently extended toward Dameron’s motionless-- corpse? Maybe corpse.

“No,” Hux said, “honestly, I thought Util was a safe bet. But that’s a good learning opportunity, I suppose.” He didn’t actually seem worried, despite having felt the need to fetch his Force user personally.

“You knew the stimulant withdrawal would kill us,” Bolt said.

Hux frowned. “You don’t look dead.”

Kylo Ren stirred. “He nearly was,” he said. “I healed him because I wasn’t sure either. _Did_ you intend them to die?”

“It shouldn’t have been fatal,” Hux said. “I just didn’t have a good way to handle it otherwise. I thought the Resistance medical facilities adequate to the task. Now, come on, I don’t have time to monologue like a madman in this closet.”

“Skywalker approaches,” Kylo said, and pulled his light saber from his belt.

“Fucking great,” Bolt said. He edged over toward Dameron’s crumpled form, and since nobody was really paying attention to him, dropped to his knees next to the guy. His fingers found skin, neck, pulse.

“He’s not dead,” Kylo Ren said.

“Could we throw him at Skywalker as a diversion?” Hux asked. “Or are you quite determined to have a proper duel with the man? Could I persuade you not to do that? Literally everyone else is ready to evacuate, I just came to get you because everyone else was too afraid to.”

“It is too late,” Kylo Ren said.

“Should I just go without you and let you get your own ride?” Hux asked, looking openly skeptical. “Because the Resistance has already seized most of the planet’s tactical points, and it seems wise to me to assume they have overwhelming force at their disposal.”

“You’ll already have to fight your way out,” Kylo Ren said. “I imagine that would go more smoothly with my assistance.”

Hux sighed heavily, put-upon, and produced a blaster from his belt. “It would,” he allowed, “if you could keep your flair for the dramatic under some kind of restraint. Otherwise, no, Ren, it would not.”

Having ascertained that Dameron had a pulse, Bolt had started frisking the man, looking to see if he had any weapons. He did not. Bolt frisked himself instead; he had no idea what was in these goddamn flight suits. Signal flares, those were, uh. Great. Useful. Maybe he could blow Kylo Ren up with one.

“What are you doing?” Hux paused his tirade to ask. Kylo Ren stepped out to position himself in the middle of the hallway.

“Surviving,” Bolt said. Somehow. Nothing was coming to mind. It seemed pretty damn certain that throwing his lot in with the Resistance was a more likely plan in this case; Hux didn’t care much either way but would probably have him debriefed extensively and then killed. Also, Bolt was realizing, these people were assholes.

“Which side are you planning to cast your lot with?” Hux asked. “I’ll alibi for you, if you want to come back to the First Order and make your report, but I honestly wasn’t expecting you to.”

“You’d have me killed,” Bolt pointed out. Maybe that was why his entire being recoiled from the suggestion.

“Probably,” Hux admitted. “You did try to kill me, a bit ago. But they’ll never trust you either.”

“No,” Bolt said. Hux hadn’t really meant it, that he could come back. It wouldn’t be worth it. Even if he redeemed himself and they took him back, they’d never trust him again. The Resistance might just execute him, but at least they probably wouldn’t drug him.

Someone fired a blaster, and Kylo Ren gestured dramatically.

“Too late to simply stroll out,” Hux sighed. “This is going to get messy.”

“We have all the exits covered,” someone called, a young man with a deep voice. “You’re cornered in there, all of you.”

“That’s FN-2187,” Bolt pointed out. “He’s a big noise now, you know. Holds a command. If he’s here, there’s a bunch of them.” Also, Finn would know what to do about Kylo Ren and General Hux.

And whatever they did to Bolt, Finn wouldn’t let them drug him. Bolt was sure of that.

“Excessive drama may, in fact, be our last option,” Kylo Ren said.

“You have two hostages,” Bolt said. “They don’t care about me particularly, but I can carry him, and they do care about him.”

“You have that jumpsuit, they might think you’re one of theirs,” Hux suggested. “It’s a good idea. Ren, if we get back to the conference room, we can get everyone out the bloody window, this doesn’t have to be dramatic at all.”

There were more blasters firing, but Kylo Ren seemed utterly unconcerned by it. “We don’t have to negotiate,” Kylo pointed out.

“I don’t really have any further use for either of them,” Hux said. “So we might as well let them go. Since you healed this one, and all. Did you kill the-- Dameron?”

“No,” Kylo said.

“Then send this one out with him. They can’t shoot us if he’s between us and them. And you don’t have to duel Skywalker if you just fucking leave. This isn’t high-level strategy, you know.”

“The man has a point,” Bolt said. It still wasn’t too late to shoot Kylo with a signal flare just to see what happened, but Bolt was willing to ride this out and see what happened and save that for Plan Z.

  
  


_____________

  


Finn fetched up against one side of the corridor, darting his head out to look. Kes had circled around with the Shozer who’d guided them in, and was already in position against the other side.

Kes tilted his head-- a question.

“They’re up there, all right,” Finn said; there was motion down at the far end of the hallway.

“Count?” Kes asked tersely.

Finn shook his head; he’d only seen motion, shadows. “A lot,” he said.

“There are no further exits from here,” the Shozer said. “Anyone left in that room has no way out but past us.”

The comm crackled, and spit out, “We’re at the lower door, no opposition yet,” in Luke’s voice. Finn had already felt his presence. He could also feel another presence down the hall.

“I think we have Kylo cornered,” Finn said into the comm, by way of reply. “All the First Order people are bottled up in here, I think.”

“You’re close, to him, anyway,” Luke said.

“Great,” Finn said. “Well, Poe’s in there too.”

Kes snapped off a shot down the hallway, and Finn leaned out just enough to see that while Kes’s aim was good, the dark-clad person who was his target put a hand out and stopped the blaster bolt.

“Oh, that’s Kylo Ren, all right,” Finn said into the comm.

Kes hadn’t seen what happened. “I assume I didn’t get him,” he said.

“No,” Finn said. He flattened himself against the wall and mentally braced as the presence down the hall swelled outward, searching. Would Kylo be stronger for having just eaten Poe or whatever he’d done? Finn really didn’t know. He only had a pretty basic idea of how to defend himself, and he knew if he let down his guard Kylo Ren could easily get in and wreck his entire mind.

There were voices, faint-- discussion was happening, beyond Kylo Ren, in that hallway. There were people in the conference room, as the Shozer had said. Not all of them were hostile. Some were local politicians. Some were Resistance operatives, from the planet’s native movement. But most of them were First Order, including some high-level officers.

It made sense they’d sent Kylo Ren out to defend them.

“We have all the exits covered,” Finn called down the hallway. “You’re cornered in there, all of you.” He was hoping that yelling would distract whoever was giving Kylo Ren orders. But he knew fine well that didn’t necessarily matter.

Kylo Ren said, quietly but distinctly, clearly talking to someone else, “Excessive drama may in fact be our best option,” and if the knight was feeling comfortable enough to deploy sarcasm like that, then he certainly wasn’t worried enough by them.

“Oh,” Kes said, clearly hearing the comment, “he sure is a Skywalker.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Finn said, but he sort of did-- Luke was a Skywalker, and so was Leia, even if properly their last names should both have been something else. He still hadn’t figured out why sometimes people had their father’s last names and sometimes their mother’s. It was one of those things. He could probably ask Kes. Poe had the same name as him. He wasn’t sure what Poe’s mother’s name had been.

“You know fine well,” Kes said. He said, “I’ve had a lot of your drama over the years,” a little louder down the hall, “don’t think I don’t know how to handle it.”

There was a moment of palpable shock-- well, Finn felt it, anyway, he didn’t know if Kes did-- and then Kylo Ren said, low and amused, “Why, Kes Dameron, I never expected-- perhaps I should have.”

“You know,” Kes said loudly, “I always figured you had your reasons for what happened and all. And I can even see my way to how somebody’d wanna stab Han Solo in the fucking chest. I just never pegged you for the type?”

“Have you come to save your son?” Kylo Ren asked. “That’s really moving. I hadn’t anticipated that at all.”

“No,” Kes said. “I mean, I’d love to, but that’s not why I’m here, entirely.”

“Why are you here, then?” Kylo Ren asked. “Surely General Organa wasn’t so tactless as to ask you.”

“She didn’t,” Kes said. “But I mean. I got pattern recognition skills, man. I don’t really know you, you were a little kid when I last talked to you so I’m not gonna pretend I can judge anything you done since then. But surely you noticed, like, Leia Organa’s got a pattern with my family, and that pattern is that she gets them killed. So I figured, who am I to fight that kind of destiny?”

It was keeping the pressure off Finn’s mind. Finn had no idea if that was Kes’s intention, or whether he were sincerely engaging in a desultory conversation with a Dark Jedi knight.

“You’ve come to die for Leia Organa,” Kylo Ren said, sounding delightedly amused.

“Sure,” Kes said, and-- fuck-- stepped out right into the middle of the hallway, blaster held at about his waist, out to the side, other arm flung symmetrically wide, palm outward. “You wanna do it yourself? I mean. Help your mom out.”

He wasn’t smiling. He was dead fucking serious. And he glanced over at Finn and shook his head. “Stay there, kid.”

“I don’t think that would count as helping her,” Kylo Ren said. “Tell me, is she here?”

“She’s on the planet somewhere,” Kes said, shrugging. He gestured. “Are you just gonna hold that blaster bolt there forever or what?”

“Should I throw it back at you? Is that what you’re after?” Kylo asked.

“Man, I don’t _want_ to die, I’m not asking you to do me a favor and finish me off here,” Kes said. “I’m just making conversation.”

“And stalling for time until Skywalker arrives,” Kylo concluded. “Or-- if FN-2187 there has some sort of explosive device that he’s setting up, I might mention that your son is in the room directly next to me, and is still alive.”

“Oh, us blowing you up would’ve been a good idea,” Kes said. “That’s a good one, that’d even be my style. No, we’re not doing anything like that, I’m just standing here like an asshole. I don’t believe you that Poe’s still alive, all the Force users were all making horrible noises and holding their heads because they could hear you torturing him to death or whatever. I’m real upset about it, kid. I didn’t come here to rescue him but that don’t mean I’m not upset.”

Kylo didn’t answer for a moment. “I suppose they’d have been able to hear that,” he mused. “I’m not used to there being anyone around who can.”

_We’re downstairs_ , Rey said, _but Luke wants me to guard the entrance instead of coming up._ She sounded baffled and resentful.

_Kylo Ren is like a black hole_ , Finn answered. Out loud in the comm he said, “Kes Dameron has lost his goddamn mind.”

“Damn right I have,” Kes said.

“No, I suppose you’re right,” Kylo said, and he wasn’t speaking to Kes. “Look, here, I’m going to hand over your son to cover our retreat, and I promise he’ll wake up and be no worse than he was when they stripped his memories and threw him at me. It’s only fair.”

“I don’t believe you,” Kes said, and Finn could tell now that he was paying attention that the man was, indeed, distraught. The hand with the blaster in it was steady, but the other hand, closer to Finn, was shaking finely, clenched into a fist, and his voice was tight, his teeth gritted.

“Don’t believe what?” Kylo asked. “Look, when I got him he was already in rough shape. If anything, he’s in better shape now, or will be once he wakes up. Your precious Jedi did more damage to his mind and memories than I ever did.”

Kes stared at, presumably, Kylo for a moment, then blinked, glanced over at Finn, and turned to look back at Kylo with a small nod. “So that’s how you prepare someone to withstand a Force interrogation,” he said, somewhat quietly.

“She stripped his memories,” Kylo said, “so that even when he broke there’d be nothing to find.” His voice had gone lower, sort of sing-songy. “I won’t deny I did him a lot of damage when last I interrogated him, near Jakku, but even that was nothing compared to what they’d done to him. I felt so bad I actually repaired some of the damage, Kes. When he wakes up he’ll be better-off.”

“Rey didn’t hurt him,” Finn said, low and angry. “She only did what he asked her to. It was his choice, Kes. He doesn’t remember that, but it was his choice. You know that.”

“We had a long talk,” Kylo said, “about how it is to only be given love conditionally. What it’s like when those who are supposed to support you withdraw that at the first sign of independence on your part. Poe was fourteen when you stopped loving him, Kes. Watch how you conduct yourself, if you demand readmittance into his life.”

“If he wants to stab me in the chest for it he can get in line,” Kes said. Something in his posture changed; his head went up a little, expression intent, eyebrows pulling together. He was watching something.

“Enjoy your reunion,” Kylo Ren said. “Don’t try to shoot me, I’ll throw it back through Poe at you.”

Finn couldn’t take it anymore, and had to poke his head out to look down the hall. Kylo Ren was turning to leave, in a flourish of robes. And a man in an orange flight suit like a Resistance pilot was coming down the hall with a body over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

With a shock, Finn recognized Bolt, eyes narrowed with effort. Last he’d known of it, the man had been confined to bed and, most importantly, back on Nellia.

But there wasn’t really time to worry about that. “They must have a way out of that room,” Finn said into his comms.

“There’s big windows,” the Shozer said.

“Yeah,” crackled up the voice of one of the other ground commanders, “they’re planning to shoot out the windows and go into a transport, we’re sure of it.”

“We’re bottlenecked,” Finn said. “We can’t stop them from here, we can’t take that room by force, the doors aren’t big enough.”

“We’ll worry about it,” the ground commander said. “Just keep them from going anywhere else.”

“Copy,” Finn said. Bolt staggered around the corner, looking badly winded, and Finn moved away to give him space to put Poe down against the wall. “Bolt, what the fuck are you doing here?”

“Uh,” Bolt said, and grunted with effort as he slid Poe’s limp frame off his shoulder. Finn caught him, carefully cradling Poe’s neck in one hand to keep him from knocking his head. Poe’s eyes weren’t quite closed, but glittered behind his lax lids. There was blood coming from his nose and ears, and he looked ghastly, but he was breathing.

Kes muttered something that might have been a curse, and Bolt backed out of the way so Kes could kneel beside Poe. Finn wanted to sit and pet Poe’s face, but he figured he’d had his chance to do that, so he got out of the way instead, and looked down the hallway to see if he could see anything. Kylo Ren had vanished through the door on the far end, accompanied briefly by another figure Finn absently thought might be an officer.

“They’re planning to evacuate,” Bolt said, breathing hard. He really shouldn’t be out of bed, Finn thought. Right around then, Finn noticed that Bolt’s coveralls had ARANA stenciled on the breast. He went still, staring at it, and Bolt caught the direction of his gaze. His expression shifted, to one of guilt. “I can explain,” he said.

“You’d better,” Finn said.

  
  


________

  


One of the Stormtroopers, the one with the deeper voice, yelled in triumph as he barreled into R4 and knocked him over. Jess winced; R4 really was a bit delicate in that gimbal, and he’d need repairs for real after this. “Got him!” the Stormtrooper yelled, sitting up. The others converged on him, half a dozen dockworkers (mostly with face tattoos), and the other two Stormtroopers.

“I’m so sorry,” Jess said, flopping her loose boot dramatically as she ran up, and it was no trouble to pretend to be utterly mortified to the point of near-tears. “I’m so sorry! I repaired him, I was so sure--”

“It’s all right, miss,” one of the dockworkers said, “we’ll help you get him loaded back up.”

“I hope we didn’t wreck anything,” Jess said, “I’ll get in so much trouble.” She knew with her hair down she looked really young. Time to milk that for all it was worth, for once.

“Get back to your posts,” the third Stormtrooper who’d shown up said, throwing up a hand in exasperation. “They didn’t leave us here for the bloody fun of it, you know!”

“Yes sir,” said the Stormtrooper who’d made the tackle, jumping to his feet.

“Thank you so much for your help,” Jess said. “I mean really-- thank you so much.” She grabbed his arm. It wasn’t as hard to do as it would have been before she knew Finn. “I don’t know what I would have done.” She’d never seen Finn in the armor, but the others had demystified it a lot. She wasn’t so terrified by the blank faceless masks anymore, the weird shaded eyepieces. There was a man under there, probably a sweet earnest one.

“Anytime, miss,” the Stormtrooper said, a little flustered; it was hard to tell from the voice, but Jess recognized the body language now. Teeny hadn’t steered them wrong. They really did gesture alike. There was a nonverbal vernacular.

“Nine-two,” the third Stormtrooper said, voice deepening in fury. “Now!”

“Yes ma’am,” Nine-Two said, and hustled back toward the transport.

“Damage sustained,” R4 beeped plaintively. Jess went and knelt beside him. It was true; his good limb was pretty battered where Nine-Two had landed on it.

“R4,” Jess said, “I’m so sorry.”

“It is,” R4 said slowly, “acceptable lossage.”

“Ay, your robot’s really busted,” the Fronteras woman said, bending to look. “Was it like that before?”

“No,” Jess said sadly. R4 hated to be actually damaged, it made him distressed and cranky. “I’m sorry, buddy. Did you see where B went?”

“Negative,” R4 beeped. “Miss, can I shut down now?”

Don’t leave me alone, Jess almost said. She bit down, for a moment, trying to think of a good reason why not. She knew R4 preferred to spend a lot of time powered down between maintenance sessions. “You didn’t see the little orange-and-white guy anywhere?” she asked the Fronteras woman.

The woman straightened, and repeated the question to her closest comrade. There were half a dozen of them around, in coveralls, three or four of them with facial tattoos, and Pava had noticed that they had definitely been doing their utmost to increase the chaos. “Orange and white,” the woman repeated one more time, and everyone shook their heads.

A young man leaned in and said, “I did manage to knock the fuel line out of the transport, though, so their tank won’t be as full as they expect.”

“Ay,” the woman said, “and fuel everywhere?”

“It shut off,” the young man said, affronted.

“The last thing we need is a huge fire,” the woman said, and as she finished saying it, her voice slowed and her eyes went wide. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

“I don’t think we need to do,” Jess began, and then stopped. “We can do better than that. I’m an X-Wing pilot and I have an astromech right here who can calculate the gun targeting.” She jerked her chin at the Blue Squadron X-Wing. “Is that thing locked down?”

“No,” the young woman said. “It’s-- listen, this sounds crazy, but it landed by itself, not under its own power or-- just like it was being lowered by someone’s hand.”

“Oh,” Jess said. She looked speculatively at it. “Can we get me into it? R4, are you operational enough to get into the astro harness?”

“Yes,” he said, a little grudgingly, but she could tell he was intrigued.

“I could just blast the fuck out of that transport,” Jess said. She squashed the tiny sense of remorse for Nine-Two, who’d only wanted to help her. This was a war and there was no time for worrying about that; he’d have shot her if he’d been told to.

“I like the sound of that,” the Fronteras woman said.

“Except I need to know where BB-8 is,” Jess said.

The woman grabbed Jess’s arm suddenly. “Did you say BB-8,” she said.

“BB-8,” Jess confirmed, bewildered. “Why?”

“Poe Dameron’s astromech?” The woman looked incredulous.

“Yes,” Jess said slowly. “Why would you know that?”

“Poe Dameron is here?” The young man heard her, and lit up, echoing the question. “Here? Now?”

“Yes,” Jess said. “Er-- not right here, he’s in-- he’s inside. How do you-- do you seriously know him?”

“Know him,” the woman said, drawing herself up. “Know him! Why, I’ve worked with his father for years. His father knew my father. We’re family. Of course I know him.”

Jess perked up. “Kes Dameron,” she said.

“Yes,” the woman said. “He’s basically my uncle.”

“He’s here,” Jess said. “Kes is here. He’s leading some of the ground troop operations with the local Resistance.”

“Oh,” the woman said, eyes shining, and turned to her coworker. “Did you hear that?”

The young man was grinning, nodding. “Let’s make some trouble,” he said. “Kes fucking Dameron! It’ll be like the old Rebellion!”

  


_______

  


Kes cradled Poe’s cheek in his hand as he used his other hand to feel for any obvious injuries. Poe was unconscious, and looked awful, his eye sockets hollow-looking and cheekbones gaunt, skin pale and sallow. His hair was too long, uncombed and wildly curly, his beard had come in thick and unruly, and he smelled of old fear-sweat. He was dressed poorly, in a too-small shirt that made him look even thinner, and he had blood all down his neck from at the least a bloody nose, if not a worse injury somewhere.

“Poe,” Kes said. He’d spared just enough attention to see that Finn was alert, monitoring the situation and taking charge of debriefing the pilot who’d carried Poe down the hall. That meant Kes had at least a moment to do this, before he went to fling himself after whatever trap Kylo Ren had set. “Poe, my baby, my child, please wake up.”

_The only time he mentioned you was when he cried in his sleep_ , Finn had said, and it had cut deep enough then that it had mostly been a numb kind of pressure. Now the wound opened, and Kes was bleeding from it in a heart he’d assumed had gone dry long ago. “Poe,” Kes said, and pulled his son’s limp body to himself, cradling him in his arms, pressing his face against the side of the boy-- man, the man, Poe was 32 now--’s head. “Poe, my baby, my child.”

Only a moment for this kind of indulgence. Kes closed his eyes; Poe was frail, thin, smaller than he normally was, but Kes’s arms remembered him better as a boy, remembered when his whole body had fit in the crook of one arm, when he’d just been a warm weight and tiny snuffly breaths, remembered when he’d been small enough to be worn in a sling, rosy-cheeked and tousle-haired and curled safely against Kes’s shoulder. Later, when he’d insisted on walking for himself, how small his warm, usually sticky, little hand had been in Kes’s.

_Look, Papa, look! Look at this! Look, Papa!_ And his bright, clear little laugh, his wonder at everything, the strange conclusions he’d leapt to, his wild discoveries and fleeting obsessions and skinned knees and breathless recountings of incomprehensible adventures.

Thirty seconds; thirty more seconds, and then Kes had to go and die. “I’m sorry, baby,” Kes murmured, and raised his head, preparing to make himself let go.

Finn was looking extremely intense, like even more so than usual, and the pilot who’d carried Poe down the hall was kind of backed against the wall, looking terrified, jaw set--

It took Kes a moment to parse what he was seeing. “Who are you,” he demanded urgently, interrupting the pilot’s hesitant recitation of whatever he was talking about.

“Uh,” the pilot said. He was Oaxctli, there was no doubting it; in his nose and the spacing of his eyes he was a dead ringer for Kes’s long-dead cousin. “What?” He spoke in Basic, blank and uncomprehending.

Leia had mentioned this. This was what she’d been talking about. Fuck. “Who the fuck are you,” Kes said, switching to Basic.

“I uh,” the pilot said. “JN-4002, sir.”

It was an alphanumeric designation like a Stormtrooper. “Xacristo,” Kes said, staring at him. “I figured she was-- I didn’t think she really knew.”

“Bolt,” Finn said. “Call him Bolt. We have to assume he’s on our side.”

“Forgiveness is easier than permission,” the pilot said, biting his lip with just a glimmer of hopeful mischief coming through his nervous fear as he cut his eyes sidelong to look at Finn, and it was exactly the expression Tito would have worn, except Tito had died thirty-two years ago, younger then than this man was now.

Poe sucked in a breath and stirred in Kes’s arms, and said, “Papa?” He sounded groggy and disbelieving.

Kes looked down at him. Poe’s eyebrows were drawn together, his eyes struggling to focus. “My little son,” Kes said softly, pushing Poe’s tangled hair back away from his face. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

Poe looked bewildered and disoriented, eyes rolling a little. Kes flashed back to think what Kurt had looked like, rhyndo’d and sick, and had to close his own eyes a moment against it; he couldn’t see his own son’s eyes look like that, not yet. He’d have to work up to it. “It hurts me, Papa,” Poe said, soft and plaintively confused.

“I’m sorry,” Kes said, making himself open his eyes. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

Poe struggled to focus on him, squinting unsteadily, but after a moment his eyes rolled back and he went limp again. Kes patted his face, but there was no response.

Still. That was something. Poe had recognized him. At least he had that.

Kes collected himself, made himself put Poe down, leaning him gently against the wall and pressing his hand to the middle of his chest for a moment, holding him steady. He looked asleep, now; better than he’d looked a moment ago. No time to speculate. “I’m sorry, baby,” Kes said, one last time, tracing the backs of his fingers down the side of his son’s face, then pulled himself to his feet and unholstered his blaster.

“Well,” he said. Both Bolt and Finn were staring at him. He tilted his head toward the distant commotion down the hall. “We’re not going to let them go, are we?”

“No,” Finn said. Kes’s blaster made a high-pitched whine as he flipped it to the ready position. He looked at Bolt.

“What about you, kid?” he asked. The pilot was standing there looking lost. He’d been watching Kes with Poe, and clearly didn’t know what to make of it.

“I don’t have a weapon,” Bolt said, perking up, “but these signal flare things could probably do some damage.” He fished one out of the leg pocket and gave it a calculating look.

Kes stared at him. “I knew you in another life,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Come on, let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate everyone's patience. I'm convinced I can get the end wrapped up in one more chapter. We'll see.  
> For the curious, if you didn't already see it, the Poe/Hux Hookup of Legend was recounted in [The Spectrum of Bad Ideas](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6644221), which I'd intended to be a standalone but heck, it's funnier to fold it into the main continuity. It possibly makes the Hux cameo in this chapter less... flippant? to know that's my headcanon for the character. 
> 
> I don't know how I'm going to wrap this up in one chapter. I have faith, though. I can do it.


	8. Way Too Much Of The Stuff

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Action sequences abound as the plot starts to wind up, I swear it is winding up, I swear it'll get resolved. Kes dads the hell out of everyone including telling Old Man War Stories for distraction purposes, Finn is a total badass, Rey lifts things with her mind, Luke weirds out the noobs as usual, and Pava has a near-death experience mostly offscreen.
> 
> Iiiii promise this is the penultimate chapter and I really am wrapping this up and finishing it. I promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a fool I was, to think this would be the last chapter. It's too much action. One more beyond this, and maybe I'll put the mushy stuff in an epilogue.  
> Also I think I managed to forbear from any unnecessary cliffhangers. I mean, it's a low-grade cliffhanger, but it's not as ridiculous as I've been doing lately. I swear those are unintentional.

  
  


The others with Luke all had blasters drawn and were earnestly peeking around corners and such. Luke was just walking down the middles of the corridors, lightsaber clipped to his belt, hands clasped lightly behind his back. He’d told them to act as though he weren’t there, because he just didn’t have combat-worthy faith in himself at this point with the level of distraction he was experiencing. But they kept shooting him looks, and he didn’t have the attention to spare to address it. 

“Hold your fire,” he said, sensing an approach through the fog of his distraction; a moment later one of the soldiers said, “Hostile?”

“Oh,” said someone coming down the corridor, “there you guys are.”

“Not hostile,” Luke said. 

The approaching person came into view, hesitating a little. He was a big Shozer, and had his hands up. “Hey,” he said, and saw Luke. “Oh, it’s-- it’s you!”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “I’m that guy.” Kylo Ren’s presence was a huge dark swollen thing pressing down on him from all sides, and Luke had himself somewhat overextended, keeping Kylo separated from Rey. Rey was doing her best, but she was so drawn to Kylo she was squashed right up against Luke from the other side, pressing him straight into Kylo with no way to avoid contact. It was exhausting and Luke was going to have a headache for weeks, he was pretty sure. 

“Good,” the Shozer said. “Uh-- well, the first wave already came through, we got everyone bottled up in the conference room on the third floor.” He gestured. “They got Poe Dameron back from the, uh, the bad guys.”

“Alive?” Luke asked. He couldn’t see Poe anymore. His Force presence wasn’t all that distinctive, but Luke had been keeping tabs on him, and he’d slipped out of view a little while back. 

“Yeah,” the Shozer said. “I mean. He moved and stuff, seemed okayish. I didn’t stick around.” 

“Good enough,” Luke said, and gestured at the Shozer to lead the way. 

 

Poe was slumped against the wall in a hallway, and at the end of the hallway, someone had just fired a blaster. Luke leaned against the wall next to Poe, and slid down, shaking a little with the effort of holding Kylo Ren off. The soldiers went down the hall, and the Shozer paused and looked down at him. 

“You supposed to be that color?” the Shozer asked, tilting his head. 

Luke nodded wordlessly. “Close enough,” he said. “Go on.” 

“Sure, boss,” the Shozer said. 

Luke closed his eyes and focused, shoring up his defenses. Rey was barely staving off meltdown, but was faithfully and steadfastly keeping her guard post at the door. Kylo was blotting out almost everything, pressing against both of them. 

“Hey,” a voice said, and Luke turned his head a little to look over. Poe had his eyes open, and as Luke looked at him, his mouth curled into a smile. “Hey, I know you.”

“Poe,” Luke said. “Good to see you again.”

“Was… my dad here?” Poe’s eyebrows pulled together slowly. He looked sort of dreamy and vague; he couldn’t really be focusing at all, because his eyes weren’t drifting with the rhyndo like they had been. “Like... just now? Or did I… dream that?”

“Kes is here,” Luke said. “He’s down at the end of the hall. Are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” Poe said. “My head really--  _ hurts _ . Kylo Ren gave me a message to give to you but I didn’t understand it.”

“Maybe hang onto it a moment then,” Luke said, alarmed; he spared an instant of focus to brush his mind across the surface of Poe’s. “Ohhh yeah. No, we’re gonna leave that be.” Poe reeked of Kylo Ren’s energy, dripping with it. It was probably a trap. Great. 

“Talking is hard,” Poe said, eyes closed. 

“Don’t, then,” Luke said. He gathered himself; seeing Poe in this state had given him a useful little jolt of anger. Yoda would have cautioned him against it but Yoda had been full of shit. Anger was very useful, in moderation, as a focusing tool. Luke was focused now, all right. “Will you be all right if I leave you here?”

“Probably,” Poe said. He was drifting, insubstantial. Luke couldn’t guess how much damage Kylo had done. But there was nothing to be done for it right now. 

He reached out, patted Poe on the shoulder with his metal hand, and then pushed to his feet. Time to go face Kylo Ren.

  
  


_____________

  
  


Kes didn’t need to wait for Finn’s report: the conference room was a goddamn mess. Finn had accurately assessed the issue from the get-go; they were bottlenecked, they couldn’t get through the door into the room to prevent the First Order troops from getting out the window. The angle the door gave them was nothing but a blank wall, and the FO had herded all the civilians in the room into that space, so that the only available targets were Util natives. 

“We can’t get in there,” Finn reported, pressing himself back against the wall. He had a scorch mark across the front of his shirt. Kes ran his hand across Finn’s chest, checking him quickly, but it was superficial, he wasn’t injured. 

Kes nodded. “Be careful, kid,” he said. He stepped back, watching the lines of fire, and assessed the wall. There was another door. He jiggled the handle. It was locked. “Who checked the floor plan? Where’s this go?”

“Storage closet,” one of the locals said, an older woman. 

“Does the back wall abut the conference room?” Kes asked. No chance to injure civilians, if they knew where all the civilians were. 

“Yes,” she said. 

Kes sized up the door hinges, stepped back with another glance at the main door to assess lines of fire, and slammed his heel into the door hinge as hard as he could. It took him three blows to get the door cracked, and then he applied his shoulder and all his weight to remove it entirely. The room was largely empty, and he pointed. “That wall?”

“This wall,” the woman confirmed.

Kes rapped at the wall with one hand, and retrieved one of the explosive charges from his jacket pocket with the other. “Everybody out,” he said, a little annoyed, to the people crowding in behind him. “I’m blowing this wall. As soon as the charge goes off, half of us should come back in here and half go to the main door and keep up suppressing fire. This hole might give us an angle on the window.”

“Understood, we’ll keep up pressure from the door then,” Finn said, and went and took up position at the main door again. 

Kes laid the charge, alone in the room, and ran to the door, pressing himself against the hallway wall for shelter. The wall blew; he had used a weak charge because he could tell the thing wasn’t load-bearing, probably wasn’t substantial; a good sledgehammer’d’ve done the trick if he’d had one. But it was enough to daze the FO, and when he ran back into the closet, they didn’t have their fire concentrated yet on the new entrance. He ducked through it and shot the Stormtrooper with the heavy repeating blaster that had made the door so impossible. 

It also let him get a good view of the room. The civilians were all huddling in terror across from the door, with Stormtroopers corralling them. The transport had made it to the window but was having trouble hovering evenly. The transport was too large a ship to be manoevered like that, and it showed. As Kes watched, someone Resistance from the door managed to get the angle to fire at the transport. 

Kes kept up a suppression pattern of fire, sending Stormtroopers scattering and keeping them from retrieving the heavy repeating blaster from their downed comrade. Whoever was at the door kept up his or her fire as well, making the transport ramp inaccessible. But it was risky; the door was no safer than it had been, and Kes couldn’t really protect whoever was at the door.

“Whoever’s at the door is gonna get shot,” Kes said into his comm, managing to pick off another Stormtrooper. “You gotta fall back.”

“Acknowledged,” someone answered, possibly Finn, but there was the crackle of blaster fire from the door, still, as whoever was at the entrance continued to hit the transport ramp. 

The Stormtroopers had regrouped and now Kes couldn’t shoot any more of them. “I mean it,” he said into the comm. “Fall back now.”

Even as he said it, one of the Stormtroopers fired from under cover, straight into the doorway. “Fuck,” Kes said, but stayed off the comm, and redoubled his efforts at suppression. 

Nobody was firing from the doorway now. He hoped nobody was dead. The transport suddenly stabilized like someone had grabbed it with a big invisible hand, which screamed Force user all over, and probably explained why Kylo Ren hadn’t been stopping all those blaster bolts. Kes was pretty hazy on how the Force worked, in specific, but he got the gist.

“C’mon,” he said to the Resistance fighters who’d come into the room after him, “we need a better suppression pattern,” and he set them up to maximize the angles they could cover, while keeping themselves safe. He didn’t need to lose anybody else. They had the planet, for now. He doubted they could hold it regardless, but the planet’s eventual fate probably did not depend on them stopping this transport here. 

The door had the angle he needed, so once he’d established good coverage, he went out, switching out the charge component in his blaster for a fresh one, and went along to the door. There were a couple of fighters covering it, but no one was leaning out to shoot through it, which was good. Finn was there, sitting against the wall, Bolt right up next to him, and they both looked up at Kes as he came jogging up. 

“We gotta get in there,” Kes said. 

“Still got those signal flares?” Finn asked Bolt.

“Sure,” Bolt said, pulling one out. He looked really anxious, like maybe he hadn’t seen a lot of combat up close or something.

“Gimme two,” Finn said. “I wanna try again to get to that pile of debris in there.” 

“Good call,” Kes said, peering through the door. There was indeed a pile of debris not too far inside the door, out of the direct line of sight a bit, with an upended table stuck in the midst of it like there’d been a firefight inside the room. 

Finn turned the signal flares over in his hands, visibly unfamiliar with them. 

“Here, let me,” Kes said. He took the flares and looked them over. Same design as they’d used during the Rebellion. He supposed there was no point changing it, but it was interesting that they weren’t something an FO trooper had ever seen before. “Who’s coming with us? Not you, kid, you don’t have a blaster.”

“I can get one,” Bolt said, a little sulky.

“Pilots are terrible shots anyway,” Kes said, and Bolt looked so profoundly offended that he had to relent. It had been worth it for the astonished grin that had crossed Finn’s face; that guy was probably a ray of goddamn sunshine most of the time, and Kes would have liked to know him in peacetime. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. It’s all right, stay back. Hey, can you go back for Poe? I don’t know that we left him a guard and I don’t know who’s behind us.”

Bolt nodded tightly. “Yes sir,” he said. 

Kes ruffled his hair, unable to control the impulse. “Thanks,” he said. “You’re with me, yes?” He pointed to the Resistance fighter next to Finn, a small wiry dark-skinned woman. “Takes about three seconds, then we go.” 

Finn nodded, and so did the Resistance fighter. Kes twisted the signal flares, setting both to “flare” instead of “sustain”, counted to three, then whipped through the door, flung them into the room with one hand while firing his blaster indiscriminately with the other, and hit the floor as they went off, then scrambled forward until he’d made it to the upended furniture pile that had been their objective. 

Finn slid into place just behind him, and the Resistance woman who’d been behind him scrambled in and grabbed the back of Kes’s shirt to steady herself. Kes found a crevice of the table he could fit his blaster through, and craned his neck to get a view of how he was aiming. The flares were still sputtering, but they’d go out soon.

The fighters in the hole in the wall had kept anyone from picking up the heavy repeating blaster, which was good, because otherwise Kes would be dead in about a second and a half. Aiming like this was tricky, but he wanted his shots to count; too much firing from here, and they’d start shooting back, but as it was, they might not realize anyone was here right away. He mentally adjusted for the distance-- he was used to shooting from the hip, but not from arm’s length like this-- and squeezed off a shot, downing a black-clad officer who was standing on the transport ramp. 

In the ensuing confusion, he picked off two Stormtroopers. But Kylo Ren was not in sight. Perhaps he was already on the transport. A pity; Kes would’ve liked to shoot him. He wasn’t as sanguine about that asshole having stabbed Han in the chest as he’d pretended. 

That was enough that they started returning fire, and the first shot seared through the table right by Kes’s face, the second one shattering a big chunk of the table into splinters of metal. Kes dropped, and so did the other two. 

“Plan B,” Kes said. 

“What’s Plan B?” Finn asked breathlessly, after a moment.

“I don’t have one,” Kes said. “I was thinking, it would’ve been a good call to come up with a Plan B.”

“That’s a good point,” Finn said. “I don’t have one either.” But he was looking at the ceiling, like he was coming up with something. No, Kes recognized that distant expression: he wasn’t thinking, he was using the Force.

The woman said, “What about all those X-Wings you guys brought?”

Finn laughed humorlessly. “They’re in orbit,” he said, “waiting for these guys to attempt to escape.”

“So,” Kes said. “We’re killing ourselves to stop them leaving just so the pilots don’t have to work too hard?”

“Incoming,” the comm crackled, “Blue Squadron X-Wing to intercept transport, evacuate the room with the windows if possible!”

“Now they tell us,” Kes said. An X-Wing was more manoeverable than this transport, but it still was going to have trouble being precise enough in close quarters. They didn’t hover all that well, in-atmo. At least, the T-65s hadn’t. He pulled out his comm. “Negative,” and he tallied the civilians quickly, “three friendlies and fifteen neutrals remaining in the room, pinned down.”

“Stay away from the windows, then,” the comm said. 

“Good fucking luck with that,” Kes said. No way, no pilot was going to be good enough to use the cannons without backstopping the blasts into the building. There wasn’t room to put the craft in a spot where the angle would work, surely. But he looked over at the huddled civilians. Politicians, many of them, it was clear enough from their sumptuous robes. One of the fanciest-dressed was slumped on the floor, clearly dead. A Twi’lek woman was watching Kes, less incapacitated by fear than the others. “Hey,” he said to her, “can you guys get out?”

“When the last of them is up the ramp I’m sure they’re going to destroy this building,” the Twi’lek said. 

Finn hauled himself to his feet. “Come on,” he said, “you’ve got to get out.” 

Kes scrambled up too, peering through one of the new blaster holes in the table. “Two on the ramp,” he said, “two next to it, otherwise they’re cleared out. The two next to the ramp going up now.”

“They’re going to start using the transport’s guns once they’ve backed away,” Finn said. He was right up next to Kes, and looked bloodless under the pigment of his skin, like maybe this was the sort of thing he’d witnessed when he worked for them.

“So we need to start shooting now,” Kes said, turning to catch Finn’s eye.

Finn nodded grimly. “I think we do,” he said. It was suicide; the last pair of troopers would concentrate fire on their flimsy shelter.

From the doorway, Luke called out, “I can shield you! Send them out to me, I can shield them!”

“Now he shows up,” Kes muttered, but he was grateful. The civilians were still huddled in terror, but the Twi’lek woman could see Luke, and visibly steeled herself to run for the door.

Just then, the transport shuddered violently, one-two. “Ion cannon,” the Resistance woman said. “Good angle!”

“That’s the X-Wing, then,” Kes said. Maybe the Resistance had pilots as good as the Rebellion had. It would be loyal of him to think so; most of them had been under his son’s command, anyway. He shot at the transport ramp, where the two last Stormtroopers were fleeing. “Come on,” he shouted to the civilians, “back down the hall, come on!”

He sent the Resistance woman ahead with the civilians and Skywalker to lead them out the way they’d secured in, and stayed back with Finn. The transport took another couple of hits, but the unnatural stabilization that had to be Kylo Ren’s powers seemed to be shielding it. The ramp closed slowly up, and the transport pulled back away from the room, and Kes grabbed Finn by the shirt and sprinted headlong with him for the hallway, expecting the transport to open fire into the building. 

But it didn’t, and they made it to the relative safety of the hallway, and back down it, and it was only then that Kes noticed that Finn had one arm clamped tightly against his side.

“Hey,” Kes said, and steered Finn gently over toward the wall. “Hey, let me see that.”

“I have limb function,” Finn said, looking glazed and weirdly guilty. 

“No shit,” Kes said, and had to pry Finn’s hand away from where he was covering a dark red patch in his pale shirt, and sure enough he’d been hit by shrapnel at some point low in his right side, below the ribs, and was bleeding pretty badly. “Fuck.” Either he was bleeding really fast, or it had happened some time ago and the stupid brave young idiot hadn’t said anything.

“I can keep up,” Finn insisted, defensive.

“No shit,” Kes said, and patted himself down for a dressing. He found one in an inner pocket of his jacket, and shoved Finn’s shirt up. “Hold still.” He found the gash, shocking red and open, not deep enough for organ damage but plenty deep enough for blood vessel damage, and made sure there wasn’t any more shrapnel lurking in it before he shoved the dressing into it and pushed down. “That’s a lot of blood.” It was coming out fast, but not fast enough to have instantly soaked through so far down. He’d been hit possibly before they’d even stormed the room. _ Idiot _ ; he shouldn’t have come along. Probably felt he had to because it was his idea. 

“My function’s not compromised,” Finn said, and Kes glanced up at his face with a frown; it was a weird thing to insist on. Finn looked absolutely goddamn terrified, and it struck Kes then that Stormtroopers didn’t stop to pick up their fallen. The old Imperial ones hadn’t, and he hadn’t observed the First Order ones doing it either.

Oh. He closed his eyes for a second, composing himself, then said, “Finn. I won’t leave you behind. This isn’t a serious injury but the blood loss could kill you before we get you to the medics. I’m going to need you to stay still and calm. That’s all.”

“I’m all right,” Finn said, and his fingers were tight around Kes’s forearm, holding onto him like a scared little kid.

“I won’t leave you, baby boy,” Kes said, heart twisting a little; this kid had been raised to believe himself disposable. They weren’t far from where he’d left Poe. He held pressure, and looked around. They’d evacuated the hallway; everyone was heading down to the ground levels, getting out of the building, which was a wise precaution even if they’d never have made it out in time had the transport actually managed to open fire like it had clearly wanted to. 

He was going to have to do this himself. 

“I, I can,” Finn said unsteadily, clearly holding onto his self-control as hard as he could. Kes wondered if he’d ever been hurt like this before. He wasn’t so young, he wasn’t a baby, and he was clearly combat experienced, the way he’d handled himself in there. But Kes himself had seen some action before his first serious injury, and he hadn’t known how to cope then either.

“Don’t, though,” Kes said. “I know you can, but don’t, okay?” Finn wasn’t a big man, but he was well-built, and Kes wasn’t sure he could carry him without hurting him. 

“Let me,” Luke Skywalker said, appearing out of the side hallway, and he held out one hand, taking Finn’s weight off Kes’s shoulder. Finn’s grip on Kes’s wrist didn’t slacken, so Kes moved with him. 

“It’s okay, baby boy,” Kes said. “Just hold onto me. It’s okay.”

 

_____________

  
  


Rey hauled herself up on her knees and went into the building, legs shaking. “Finn,” she said; she could hardly see, with the effort of keeping herself from being sucked into Kylo Ren’s black hole of a psychic presence. But there had been a light-- Finn’s constant presence, something to cling to-- and now it was gone. It had faltered, and dimmed, and she couldn’t find him now, and she was desperate. 

“Rey,” someone said, and she couldn’t really see them; she stumbled, distraught, toward the last place she’d seen him. Whoever the person was caught her by the shoulder, and helped her avoid crashing into a wall.

“Where’s Finn,” she said, “I need Finn-- I can’t see him anymore--”

She was overextended and pulled out of herself and helpless, and it was Kylo’s doing maybe, but she’d been relying on Finn. Luke was distracted, he was doing something now, and Finn was gone. 

Someone was holding her against the wall, and she reached out for Luke, but Kylo’s sucking presence was like breathing tar and she couldn’t see anything. She screamed, whether out loud or only in her mind she didn’t know, and changed direction; instead of reaching for Luke again, she lunged at Kylo, meaning to tear through him to find Finn. 

Kylo was being held back by something too; he couldn’t reach her, though he tried. 

_ It wasn’t me _ , he said, more distantly than his oppressive closeness suggested.  _ I didn’t hurt him. It wasn’t me _ . 

_ Rey, get back _ , Luke said, very faint but very close.  _ I’ve got Finn. Get back. You need to get back _ .

Someone pushed her-- Luke pushed her?-- or she pulled, and suddenly she was present in her physical body again, like someone had slammed a hatch shut in a room with a leaky atmospheric seal. She sat down suddenly on the floor, and sucked in a breath and looked around. 

She was in an entrance foyer to a grand building, on the ground floor, and there were a number of alarmed-looking people she recognized as Resistance fighters, some from the planet and some from the Resistance’s more formal establishment. They were all staring at her. She’d probably screamed out loud, then.

Nobody spoke. She caught her breath, and realized she was holding the hilt of her lightsaber but it was off. She hooked it back in her belt and raised her shaking hands to her face. “Where’s Finn?”

“He’s up-- upstairs, ma’am,” one of the Resistance fighters said. “There’s a firefight, they have the First Order’s diplomatic contingent cornered in a conference room.”

She started to climb to her feet, and then caught sight of Poe, sitting against the far wall. She got up the rest of the way and started toward him, but stopped dead when she realized it wasn’t him at all, it was a younger man in a pilot’s jumpsuit, staring at her in blank surprise. She hesitated, but then saw that the person sitting next to him really was Poe, looking blearily semiconscious and leaning against his shoulder. 

“Poe,” she said, and went over to him, dropping to her knees next to him. He had blood smeared across his face and neck, like he’d had a bloody nose that hadn’t gotten cleaned up well. He blinked, and moved his head, widening his eyes in a futile attempt to focus on her. 

“He’s not in great shape,” the young man who looked like him said. “Kylo Ren was rattling around in his head.”

“I know,” Rey said. She reached out with one hand, and Poe suddenly recognized her and jerked backward.

“Don’t touch me,” he said, and there was fear in his expression. He was looking at her outstretched hand. “Stay away from me.”

Rey lowered her hand, stricken. But of course he didn’t remember. “Oh,” she said. “No, listen-- before all of this happened, you asked me to do this, and I promised I’d put it back the way it was.”

“Don’t touch me,” Poe repeated, and his eyes were glassy with terror. “Haven’t you done enough damage?”

“I promised you,” she said, near tears now. Everything was too much. “I promised-- Poe, I have to fix you so we can go save Finn, Finn’s gone, I can’t feel him, he’s hurt or gone or something.”

“Hey,” the young man said, taking the hand she was reaching for Poe with, that Poe was recoiling from. He folded his hands around it, bending her fingers down gently. “Hey, hang on a sec, give him a second. Even if you fix him up I think he’s gonna need a little bit before he’s good to go running off and rescue anybody.”

“I promised,” Rey said, and the world seemed to be shaking, maybe from the blaster fire upstairs. “I, Poe, you made me promise.”

“I’m not saying don’t do it later,” the pilot said, and he was holding her hand very delicately, like it was fragile. “But like. He’s real fucked-up right now and I am telling you, just this moment, you gotta give him a minute.”

“I can’t,” Rey said, and now his hands were shaking, or maybe it was that her hand was shaking. She was so overextended, and yet she couldn’t feel anything, or anyone. She couldn’t feel Poe. She couldn’t feel anything. “I  _ promised _ you, Poe--” and Poe recoiled from her a little, and it was like being stabbed. She turned to the other man, the pilot, beseeching. “I promised him I wouldn’t leave him like this a moment longer than I had to.”

“Somebody gave you _ way  _ too much of the stuff,” the pilot said, urgent but gentle. “Hey. Friend. Just look at me a minute, and breathe in and hold it for a count of three, okay?” She blinked at him, and considered throwing his hands off her, but maybe he knew something. She didn’t know who he was. So she breathed in, and he counted to three exaggeratedly, and said, “Okay, let it out slow.”

She breathed out, and closed her eyes a moment, trying again to find Finn. But she reached out carefully, this time, and held herself away from Kylo’s great sucking presence-- he was wrapped up in something, was the thing; he wasn’t even trying to reach out for her anymore. He was trying to hold the starcraft steady, the transport-- no, he was trying to force the X-Wing down. No, he was trying to do both. It was an enormous drain of his power and yet he still was managing to crush Rey by the sheer force of his presence.

“You got the shakes pretty bad,” the pilot said. “Breathe through it, I know it’s rough but it wears off.”

There he was. Finn was still there, he was just-- he had shrunk down, curled in on himself. But he was present, a palpable soft blue glow, low and subdued. She couldn’t muster any words, but she pushed a worried thought at him and he sort of rippled in response, nonverbal. He was frightened, and she could tell it was because he was injured. 

“He’s hurt,” she said, opening her eyes. “Finn’s hurt.”

“Shit,” the pilot said, and then frowned. “How do you know that?”

“I can feel him in the Force,” she said, and frowned back. “Who are you?” Someone had said Poe’s father was here, but this man was younger than Poe. Maybe Poe had a-- another person who was related to him, or something, that was a thing people had. 

“I’m called Bolt,” he said warily. “Who are you? Are you like Kylo Ren?”

“No,” she said, “I’m Rey, I’m a Jedi.”

“Aw, who the fuck would give uppers to a Jedi?” Bolt said, incredulous.

A dull, percussive thump came through the air; it was the X-Wing’s ion cannon, and Rey could feel the Force shimmering around both starcraft, the First Order transport and the X-Wing. Kylo Ren and Luke were fighting it out, struggling for control. Abruptly, Luke’s hold on the X-Wing slipped, and Kylo’s power slammed it down toward the ground. Rey could feel, then, the spike of pure terror of the pilot inside, and she grabbed onto that pure sensation and gritted her teeth and shoved back against Kylo.

The X-Wing hung, improbably suspended, in midair; Rey didn’t have to look to know that she’d caught it a handful of meters away from the trees outside. If it had crashed, the shockwave could have leveled this building. The pilot was still panicking; it was a woman Rey didn’t know, someone with the Resistance, someone who knew Finn and she wasn’t sure how she could taste that, but she could.

She opened her eyes-- she’d stood up, she was standing, hands flung wide, over Poe and Bolt, who were staring up at her. “What the fuck,” Bolt said, into the silence in the room. 

With a great sucking, tearing feeling, Kylo’s presence slid away, and Rey staggered; she had her arms flung out, holding the X-Wing. “Land it,” she said out loud, trying to shove the words into the pilot’s head; she had no idea where it would be safe to set the thing down, it was more concentration than she had. “ _ Land _ \--  the  _ thing _ .”

The pilot’s panic eased slightly, and Rey felt the thrusters come back online, a shaky feeling of physical control. “Can I let go,” she said, and was rewarded in a moment with a ripple of assent from the pilot. 

She sat down hard, and outside she could hear the high whine of the starcraft’s in-atmo propulsion as it lowered itself somewhere nearby. 

She was shaking violently all over, she could recognize that now. She managed to get to her hands and knees and crawl back toward Poe.

“What the fuck just happened,” Bolt said, watching her approach. He got to his knees too, and came over to put his hand on her shoulder, steadying her.

“The X-Wing didn’t crash,” Rey said, and sat down within arm’s length of Poe. She bent over, putting her face in her hands for a moment, collecting herself. “Poe, please. You made me promise. If I wait any longer I might not still have it all intact.”

“Have what,” Poe said warily. He had his back pressed against the wall, like she was poisonous, like she’d hurt him if she touched him. He was afraid of her. 

“All your memories,” she said. “Everything. I took them for safekeeping.”

“Kylo said it was you,” Poe said. “He said you’d done this to me.”

“You asked me to,” Rey said. “You asked me to!”

“Rey,” Luke said, coming into the room suddenly, “you need to stay away from Poe.”

Rey looked up at him in astonishment. He was drawn and exhausted-looking, and grim. “What?”

“Kylo laid a trap in his mind,” Luke said, “his energy is all over him. You need to stay away from him, it’s not safe.”

Rey stared at him in dismay, then turned and looked at Poe. “But I promised,” she said. “I promised you, Poe.”

“We’ll think of something else,” Luke said. “I have to disarm the trap before we can get in there.”

“I don’t think I want anyone else in my head anytime soon,” Poe said, sharper than she’d heard him speak before. It was like being stabbed, hearing his voice like that, being rejected by him like that-- she’d never felt like this before, it was maybe the worst thing she’d ever felt.

She opened her mouth to speak, to try to tell him-- something, what could she even tell him-- but her attention was snagged by Finn coming into the room, with a man she didn’t know half-supporting him, and Luke was supporting him the rest of the way. He wasn’t moving, he was halfway limp in the man’s grasp, Luke taking most of his weight with the Force, and there was blood everywhere. 

“Finn,” she said. 

“It’s a lot of blood,” the man with him said, “but he’ll be all right if he stays still and calm, got it?”

He and Luke let Finn down against the wall near Poe, and Finn’s head moved a little, looking around. “I”m okay,” he said. 

Rey knew that if she went to him, Poe would flinch away from her, so she stayed still and watched as Poe turned to Finn in concern. But he only looked at Finn for a moment, then looked at the man holding him. “I thought I was imagining things.”

“No,” the man said, “it’s really me. Better late than never. Guess how many credits I bet that you’d find a way to use yourself as bait?”

“I hope we all live for you to collect ‘em,” Poe said. “And for me to find out just what it was that finally got you to show up for this.”

“I was wrong, Poe,” the man said, sounding tired. Clearly, he and Poe were old friends, reuniting after a disagreement or something. “I was wrong and you were right, there isn’t really anything else to it.” 

Rey leaned in, then, since Poe was distracted, and put her hand on Finn’s face. Finn gave her a faint smile. His skin was cold, his eyes a little glassy. He was frightened, she could feel it coming off him. 

“It’s a flesh wound,” Luke said, “and bacta will sort it within hours, we just have to keep pressure on that blood vessel so he stays alive until someone can tend him properly.”

“You told me never to speak to you again,” Poe said bitterly to the man.

“Do you want me to hold pressure?” Rey asked. “We can’t let Kylo get away, we have to stop him here.”

“That’s not what I told you,” the man arguing with Poe said, then turned to her. “I’m holding pressure. You don’t need the Force to hold pressure, it’s all right.”

She looked at him. Come to think of it, he looked like Poe too; he was maybe Luke’s age, maybe younger, and handsome, clean-cut, dark-eyed, dark hair peppered with gray, laugh lines around his eyes. Maybe she was seeing things, surely not everyone in this room looked like Poe. But he did have his hand pressed against the bloody stain in Finn’s shirt, he had a bandage or something and he was holding Finn tightly with it. “Kes is right,” Luke said. “We should go after Kylo. He’s going to run into the rest of the X-Wings, they’ve formed a blockade, but they can’t face him the way we can.”

“No,” Poe said suddenly, and reached out and grabbed Luke’s shoulder. “That was what he was saying to me. He said that if he and Rey fought each other, they’d destroy each other, and Snoke would-- absorb their power? Something like that.”

“He was in the process of constructing a trap in your consciousness at the time,” Luke said dryly, “so I sort of doubt his exact motivations for telling you this. I see where he’s coming from, Poe, but I also see where he’s coming from, if you catch my drift.”

“I won’t let Kylo destroy me,” Rey said. “If I think I might lose, I’ll break off my attack. I have to come back because I have to give you back your memories, Poe.”

“I don’t want them,” Poe said, and that bitter note was back. “I don’t want anything else to get shoved into my head.”

Rey was looking at Finn, so she saw his eyes go wide. “Poe,” Finn said, stricken, “you can’t-- but--”

“Shh,” the man said, “baby boy, you gotta stay still.”

“What am I missing,” Poe went on, “two weeks of rhyndo and abandonment? I don’t really need that back.”

Rey gave Finn a soft smile; he was wide-eyed, staring at her a little open-mouthed. He was as shocked and hurt as she was, and that little knowledge of solidarity gave her the composure she needed to cope with it. “You spent that time with  _ me _ , Poe,” she said, but didn’t look at Poe. “Whatever happened in that time, it meant you trusted me enough to remove the memories in the first place.”

“Kylo Ren was going on and on about all the damage you’d done to him,” the man said gently, to her. “It was compelling. I don’t blame him for believing it.”

“For some reason I didn’t expect this,” Rey said, “but I should have.” She caressed Finn’s cheek, and eased backward to stand up. “I’m going to go keep Kylo Ren from destroying all of our X-Wings, but I promise I’ll come back.”

 

_____________________

  
  


“Wait,” Kes said urgently, as Luke stood after a moment and gathered himself to follow the Jedi girl. “Wait, wait.” 

Luke turned and looked down at him; he looked exhausted and ancient and like there was a lot more going on behind the scenes than the action at hand would suggest. Kes shook his head tightly. “I can tell you just let go of whatever you were holding here,” Kes said, and pressed his other hand against the dressing in Finn’s side to show Luke his blood-wet fingers. “I guess I was wrong about not needing the Force to hold pressure.”

“Shit,” Luke said. Finn made a little noise and twitched in Kes’s grasp. Poe turned in alarm to look at him. 

“I already called for a medic,” Kes said. “I can’t hold pressure any more precisely than this.”

“I thought I’d stopped the bleeding,” Luke said. “I have it now, I’m holding it again.”

“How do you feel, buddy?” Poe asked Finn, his face soft with concern. He looked more like Kes remembered him looking with that expression, despite the beard and wild hair. The way his forehead kept pinching, he had a brutal headache, and he didn’t seem able to get his eyes open quite all the way, but he looked coherent enough, like he might actually be okay.

“Cold,” Finn said. 

“Can you save him?” Bolt asked, very quietly, and his eyes were wide. Kes glanced over at him, and he was staring in quiet fascination at Finn’s injury. Oh, he was from the First Order too, or so Kes had understood in the quarter-second he’d had to figure out who the kid was. He’d been raised disposable too. It made Kes’s jaw ache to think of it.

“You know what time it is?” Kes said to Luke, who smiled faintly in bewilderment, through his distraction.

“I don’t know,” Luke said. 

“It’s old man war story time,” Kes said. “I’m going to keep these injured kids still and quiet with a good old man war story.”

“That’s a good idea,” Luke said, smile easing into something fond and amused. Poe actually laughed, soft and pained but still a laugh.

“One time,” Kes said, “during the Rebellion against the Empire, I was younger than either of you is now, and I was a pretty green recruit, I hadn’t been in long. And I caught a collapsing durasteel beam straight across the torso. Broke all the ribs on one side, collapsed a lung, broke the shoulderblade and collarbone, broke my jawbone, cracked my pelvis. There was some other organ damage, too, I almost bled to death internally.”

“I never knew that,” Luke said. Poe was shaking his head too, eyebrows pulled together. It was a Shara expression, and Kes refocused on Luke rather than letting that distract him. 

“Why would you?” he said. “You weren’t around, man. It was pretty bad.” He made a face, for Bolt’s benefit, since the boy was staring at him in such suspense. “Took ‘em twelve hours to collect us after the mission, and we had to pack out to the evac point. The other guys-- I didn’t even know most of their names yet, I’d been in like, a matter of months. It wasn’t long after Yavin. And the Rebellion-- listen, we weren’t well-organized. We had nothing. We really didn’t have anything. We didn’t have uniforms really. I didn’t, anyway. But those guys, most of them didn’t know me from any old stranger, they carried me out of there-- they took the straps from a couple of our backpacks, and stretched somebody’s jacket over it, and scooped me up on there and got me to the evac point. I’m, like, delirious, I can’t even remember how to speak Basic, I’m screaming uncontrollably because it hurts so bad, I’m yelling at them in a language none of them speaks, they don’t even know me.”

“But they saved you anyway?” Bolt looked like he was considering that. Finn was just staring, wide-eyed. 

“They hauled my heavy, fucked-up ass all the way back to the evac point,” Kes said. “Even though I was in a pretty bad way, by the end, and they didn’t think I was going to make it-- I was in shock, my lung’s deflated and I couldn’t really breathe, my lips are blue and I’m all fucked-up, drooling blood, I couldn’t talk really. And they set me down and they were talking it over, I don’t think they knew I could hear them. The one guy, he had my name wrong, he kept calling me Kath, and he’s like, trying to talk me through it, all upbeat, it’s gonna be okay Kath, hang in there buddy! And the others are like, this poor asshole’s toast.”

“But they saved you,” Bolt said, like it was in doubt. 

“Of course they did,” Kes said. “One of them said, even if he dies, we can’t leave his body here, we gotta get him out. And they got me to the evac point, and somehow the medics scraped together enough supplies-- they cut me open and like, wired my ribs back together, there’s a scar, I’ll show you later-- and managed to get enough bacta to fix my lung and my whatever it was, my spleen or something, it couldn’t have been that or I’d’ve bled out, but it was something like that. I was out for three weeks, I think.”

Bolt and Finn both looked impressed. “And that was okay,” Bolt said. 

“When I came back, the first thing that happened was that the one guy apologized for saying my name wrong,” Kes said. “He’d carried my dead-weight enormous ass for miles on bad terrain on an improvised stretcher and he was fucking sorry he’d said my name wrong. Really.”

“What did you say?” Luke asked, smiling; his expression was a little distant and Kes knew he was doing more than holding an artery shut with his mind.

“I bought him a beer,” Kes said. “We were the Pathfinders, we weren’t really the sentimental type. I bought them all beers and taught them how to swear in Iberican so that next time that sort of thing happened they’d know what I was saying.”

Bolt looked delighted. “Fuck, that’s amazing,” he said. 

“I never heard that one,” Poe said, frowning. 

“Really?” Kes shrugged. “Well. It got so I figured everybody’d heard all of my stories so I stopped telling most of them. And you wouldn’t have heard that one from anybody else.”

“No?” Poe was frowning, like he was skeptical.

“No,” Kes said, “because all those guys are dead. Not a one of them made it through the war. Your mother knew about some of it but she wasn’t there, she didn’t know the whole story. But I know you’ve seen the scars where they cut me open.” He had a vivid memory of Poe’s small fingers tracing the ridge along his back, some warm night out on the deck.

“On your back,” Poe said. From how softly he said it, he was remembering the same thing.

“Yeah,” Kes said. He looked over at Finn, who was looking glassy again. “So compared to that, this is nothing, kid! You’ll be back to normal by tomorrow, maybe the day after.”

Bolt fidgeted. “Can you teach me to swear in Iberican?” he asked.

“I can teach you more than that, kid,” Kes said. He noticed that Poe’s nose had started bleeding again. “Son, get over here, you need to sit still too until a medic can take a look at you. You’re friends with Finn, aren’t you? Get cozy, I don’t want you moving around too much either.”

“I’m fine, Papa,” Poe said crossly, and it was such a twelve-year-old thing to say that Kes was helpless not to laugh. 

It hurt, it hurt to laugh, and it hurt more when Poe realized why it was funny and gave him a wry self-deprecating little smile. “Indulge me,” Kes said. Poe sighed, and came over and leaned against Finn, putting his head down and wiping his nose on his sleeve. Kes used his less-bloody hand to tousle Poe’s hair, very gently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Rey and Pava (that's who's flying the blue squadron X-wing, if it wasn't evident) staring at one another and Pava yelling "DID WE JUST BECOME BEST FRIENDS" and Rey yelling "YEP". I've seen like, five movies in my life, and TFA was one of them, and whatever that dumbass movie that exchange is from is the other. In my defense, I was on a bus and it was playing. Will Ferrell was in it. I have no idea how many Ls are in his name. Wil Ferel. I don't know.  
> (Actually Pava nearly clocks Rey with a spanner because she gets startled but hey same diff.)  
> Also next chapter: Leia has to stop Kylo. And Poe has to figure out why Rey, who he's barely even _met_ , right, would be so upset that he won't let her in his head.   
> Also we need Finn's POV and I'm bummed we couldn't get it this chapter.


	9. Don't Like It In The Wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Don't tell me the Force doesn't work like that because the Force does what it damn well pleases. Rey and Pava get to shoot at Kylo, BB-8 does some unexpected heroics, Leia becomes the unwitting fulcrum upon which the plot turns, and Poe, well. Poe and Kes have a pretty weird time. Bonus: Finn saves Poe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I split chapter 9 up into two pieces because winding up the loose ends took a lot more time than I thought. So, this chapter is all the action, and then the next bit is all the fallout.  
> There's nothing wrong with a 20,000-word chapter, but for consistency's sake, I just felt like it worked better to have it be two.

 

 

 

Trying to repair an X-Wing’s landing gear while maintaining vigilance against getting shot in a firefight was an exercise in fierce, intense concentration coupled with abject terror, Jess discovered. She banged the bent strut back straight with the heaviest wrench in the toolkit. The strut still wasn’t quite straight, but it was straight enough that it could deploy, probably once, before it snapped off, and that was going to have to do.

The toolkit wasn’t quite standard. It didn’t have any of the usual sensors in it for inspecting equipment. She had a nagging feeling she knew whose it was. Arana never used the sensors, because he could see so far outside the normal range of human vision. It made sense for this to be Arana’s bird.

Except that she couldn’t imagine why Arana would have gone rogue like that, why he’d try to suicide-dive Kylo Ren like that. He was upset about Poe, but they all were. He’d been acting really weird onboard the cruiser on the way here, but she’d figured he was just extra fucked up by the space sickness on top of everything.

“Do you have eyes on the transport?” Jess said into the jury-rigged comm unit she’d spliced from a belt unit and the helmet she’d borrowed. (Whoever had flown this X-Wing here hadn’t left the helmet in it, or the respirator unit, and that meant she couldn’t take this thing out of atmosphere unless and until she modded the cabin, which she wasn’t sure she had the parts for.)

“Negative but it’s on instruments,” Bastian said, blurry with distance. “There are three small craft, we’re still working on identifying how they have the personnel split up.”

“Look for BB-8’s transponder,” Jess said. “I am about 90% certain ey’s on one of them, and it’d be the one with Kylo Ren on it.”

“Oh, shit,” Bastian said.

“Yeah,” Jess said.

“Is this craft functional?” a woman’s voice demanded, and Jess nearly clocked the woman who’d come up behind her with the wrench she still had in her hand.

“Fuck,” Jess said, managing to abort the swing, and clutched at her chest. It was Rey, the Jedi girl, looking intense and pale and kind of terrifying. “Sorry. What? Yes, the bird works, but if you don’t have a chestbox you’re not getting far in it.”

“Is this an 85?” Rey asked, ducking her head. “It’s an 85. Don’t they have a mod?”

“You’d have to be cracked to trust it,” Jess said. She had been planning on trying just that, after fixing the strut. The strut repair was her attempt to delude herself that she wasn’t being suicidal in her desire to avenge Poe. That, and she’d comm’d the Fronteras ground crew to ask if they had a spare unit lying around, and they’d told her to give them a minute to look.

(Maybe she could understand why Arana had gone rogue after all, but she wasn’t thinking about it too hard.)

“I read the manual,” Rey said. “It seemed straightforward enough. Anyway it _has_ to work, I can’t reach from here.”

“Are you commandeering this craft, then?” Jess asked, following Rey up the ladder.

“I have to go after Kylo Ren,” Rey said, climbing into the cockpit and immediately prying the dashboard open. Jessika stared at her hands and had a moment of incredulity at herself: some part of her brain, in the midst of all this near-death peril, was finding Rey’s competence hot, and that really wasn’t okay, nor was it particularly characteristic of herself, and maybe it was just having been saved from certain death by her but lots of people had saved Jess and she’d never felt like this about it before.

“Okay,” Jess said, “but BB-8’s up there too, I tried to tell Bastian and I don’t know if he gets it.”

“BB-8,” Rey said, looking up from where she was disassembling the life support system’s hookups. “What’s ey doing up there?”

“Ey smuggled emself onto one of the FO transports,” Jess said, “or at least, I’m almost positive. I couldn’t get a reading off the transponder, not specifically anyway. But I’m almost positive ey’s on the same one as Kylo Ren.”

“Great,” Rey said. She suddenly smacked her hand against her forehead. “Oh, the pilot of this ship is inside and has his chest box on, I saw him like a minute ago.”

“Really?” Jess frowned. “Is it Arana? Why hasn’t he checked in?”

“He said his name is Bolt,” Rey said with a shrug. “He’s in there with Poe and somebody.”

“Bolt,” Jess said, and her guts went cold. “What the hell is Bolt doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Rey said. “I didn’t ask. Why?”

“He’s a First Order TIE pilot, that’s why,” Jess said. “He doesn’t know how to fly an X-Wing. He’s not-- what the hell?”

“Really,” Rey said, pausing in her work to look up.

“Yeah,” Jess said, “he’s absolutely not supposed to be out here. Fuck, I’ll go get the chest box.”

Jess slid down the ladder and ran into the building. A startled guard she vaguely recognized as Resistance said, “What--” and she interrupted her to demand, “Poe?” and got an “Ah,” and a gestured direction in reply.

Poe was leaning against Finn, propped against the wall, and sure enough, Bolt was sitting next to them, staring transfixed at Kes Dameron. He was wearing a jumpsuit that said ARANA on the chest, and sure enough, still had the chestbox on.

“Fuck,” Jess said, “Bolt? Where’s Iolo?”

“Uh,” Bolt said, hunching in on himself a little. “Uh, he’s. He’s back, uhh, at the base. I uh. We switched places.”

Jess stared at him. She’d spoken to Arana on the cruiser, though. She’d brought him food. She’d… never seen his face. He’d had that fucking towel over his face and he’d been extra weird. In hindsight, fuck _yes_ that was suspicious, what the _fuck_. “What?” she demanded. “What-- that was _you_? The whole fucking time?”

Bolt cringed. “I didn’t-- mean to lie to you,” he said miserably. “We just-- we had to--”

“And Arana _agreed_ to this? I’ll kill him,” Jess said.

“Wait,” Poe said, “what?”

“Iolo didn’t agree to it,” Finn said quietly. “They drugged him.”

Jess looked at Finn, and it was then that she noticed that Finn’s shirt was soaked with blood and the senior Dameron had his hand wedged into the injury. “Oh, Finn,” she said. It took the wind right out of her righteous fury.

“It’s a flesh wound,” Kes Dameron said, and it was nearly the first thing she’d heard him say. (He looked a lot like Poe, but if Poe were big and terrifying and prone to glowering silences, and kept his hair short and went gracefully silvery around the edges.) “If we keep the bleeding under control it’ll take like, five minutes for a medic to fix him.”

Jess nodded tightly. “Good,” she said. “We need you, man.” She gestured at Bolt. “Give me that chest box.”

Bolt unhooked it and wriggled the hose end out of his jumpsuit. “Here,” he said. “It turns out X-Wings are really hard to fly. I gotta re-evaluate how I think of you guys.”

“You didn’t seriously do it without an astromech,” she said. “Or did you-- where’s the astro?”

“I did it without an astro,” Bolt said, “and it was a goddamn nightmare.”

“You can’t,” Jess said. She took the chest box. “Man, I am gonna kick the shit out of you later, I tell you what. I gotta go.”

 

____

 

The young TIE pilot stared after Pava’s retreating back in dismay. “She’s,” he said, and glanced nervously over at Kes. He met Poe’s eyes briefly, uncertain. “She’s gonna kick the shit out of me, huh?” It was said lightly but a little tentatively, and Poe recognized the sentiment: Bolt had no idea whether Pava had the authority to do that, and also wasn’t sure how this was supposed to work.

Poe hadn’t really had a lot of time to wonder how TIE pilots treated each other. He didn’t now, either, and Finn’s hand was so cold in his, Finn was clearly so frightened, he didn’t have the attention to pay to Bolt.

“Pilots,” Kes said, with a clearly put-on dismissive tone. He had his head craned as if looking at Pava, though she was already out the door. From the way he tilted his head, he was pretending to check out her ass. “I’d let her, if I were you,” Kes added, turning to Bolt with a grin and an eyebrow quirk.

“Dad,” Poe said, scandalized; of course tough brunette fighter pilots were Kes’s type, ugh. He spluttered a little in his indignation, overdoing it for effect. “Don’t-- she could be your-- she could be _my_ daughter!”

Kes turned to look at Poe then, raising both eyebrows in a coolly amused expression that was as familiar as breathing. “Kid,” he said, “no _way_ were you that precocious. You woulda been right square in your awkward phase of all knees and elbows when she was conceived, I can tell you that right now. No _way_ you fathered any kids back then.”

“Dad,” Poe said again, pretending to be disgusted. “Still!” It was almost as bad as when Iolo had developed a crush on Kes, and how hot Dameron Senior was had been the only thing he’d talked about for months.

“Relax,” Kes said. “You know I don’t hit on your little friends. I’m just trying to advise this young fellow here.” And he winked.

Poe pinched the bridge of his nose, mostly to hide that he couldn’t keep a straight face. As Rey had left, the smothering, stabbing pressure on his skull had eased, and he could almost stand to have his eyes open now. “Norasol is going to have a fit, by the way,” Poe said, focusing suddenly on the inexplicably-not-dead TIE pilot. He could not have been a more classically textbook example of one of the Missing if he’d been deliberately cast in the holodrama adaptation of the story.

“She’s going to have several fits,” Kes said. His voice went gentle, and he reached over and delicately swiped his thumb across Poe’s face, just above his upper lip. “Baby, your nose is bleeding so much. I need you to keep still.”

Poe took the handkerchief Kes produced from somewhere in his jacket, and pinched his nose absently. “It’s all right, Papa,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt as much.” He was starting to feel less dissociated, as well; more like he knew where he was, what planet he was on, what was going on. He kept his fingers twined through Finn’s. Maybe Finn was in love with Rey but Poe could still comfort him, surely. Rey, now: she was terrifying, glowing from within, some kind of creature out of legend. Poe wasn’t sure he’d ever have the guts to have a normal conversation with her. He had snatches of half-memory of her looking normal, even friendly, conversational, intimate, but he wasn’t sure those weren’t dreams or illusions of some kind. He even had a surprisingly vivid and inexplicable sense-memory of her weight across his body as she sat in his lap, and that made no sense at all. She’d clearly put some odd stuff into his mind while she was removing things.

It still hurt to have his eyes open, a little, but not so badly he couldn’t look at his father for a moment. Kes was-- older than he remembered, not a lot but noticeably, the lines around his mouth graven deeper with age, his hair more silvered than when Poe had last seen him. And he looked grim and tired and sad.

“Papa,” Poe said quietly. Bolt was sitting curled in on himself with his hands in his lap, and he should be dead. Poe should be dead, too, though. He wasn’t going to waste time worrying about that. Not when Finn was bleeding and clinging to Poe’s hand. “Why are you here, really?”

Kes sighed heavily. “Because the world’s going to end, one way or another,” he said. “Because there’s no point to dying of old age, and little chance of it anyway. Because Etto came to me and told me he would take over the harbor at Yavin IV and make sure the planet didn’t starve to death, inasmuch as anyone could guarantee that.”

“How is Etto?” Poe asked, perking up a little. He loved Etto, he’d seen him back when he’d first defected to the Resistance. He’d been a character in Poe’s life as long as he could remember, and had always been a great person to know, funny and quick on the uptake and not too enamored of himself, and, crucially, an excellent source of gossip about the foibles of a very young Kes Dameron before he’d gotten too sensible.

“His wife and daughter and son-in-law and grandson are dead,” Kes said. “They were on Hosnia.”

“Oh,” Poe said, deflating.

“We fought so our children could have better lives,” Kes said. “And then dear helpful sweet Iolo Arana comes to me, all the way out to Yavin from wherever he was supposed to be stationed, absent without leave I found out, and he is shaking and trying not to cry, and he brings me a holo, Poe, and it’s you, and you’re bleeding and terrified, and Iolo says they think you must be dead, and looking at you in the holo I can only think that it would be kinder if you were. And I thought, what is the point of staying here and waiting for death?”

“Oh, Papa,” Poe said, pained. “I didn’t know there was a holo.” He _had_ known, he’d been aware of Senata taking the recording, he knew Finn had seen it, but he hadn’t counted on Iolo’s attempts to help.

Damn it, Iolo.

“There was,” Kes said. “It was-- your eyes, Poe, you could see…” He trailed off, and frowned, and leaned in. “Your eyes.”

Poe blinked. “What?” But even as he said it, his awareness sort of shredded through the last of his weird lingering detachment, and he realized that his eyes were steady. “Holy shit,” he said, and sat up.

“Don’t move,” Kes hissed, lapsing into rapid-fire Iberican. “Xacristo, you’re bleeding from the nose and the ears--”

“I can see, though,” Poe said, looking around the room. His vision was steady. “I can-- nothing’s moving.”

Finn twitched, and Kes hissed at him too, still in Iberican. “Keep still!”

Poe couldn’t help but laugh, buoyed on a jubilant wave of realization. “It stopped! Nothing’s spinning!”

“Did Kylo Ren heal you?” Finn said, frowning intently.

“I said keep still,” Kes said, remembering to switch back to Basic.

Skywalker had been sitting a few paces away, clearly in a trance or something, but his awareness snapped back to them. “What?” he said.

Poe shook his head experimentally, then more rapidly, and stared wide-eyed as the world stabilized normally. “The rhyndo’s gone,” he said. “I mean-- or whatever it is.” His head still hurt, so it was painful to focus his eyes, but he did it anyway just because he hadn’t been able to in so long, and it wasn’t that it was easy, but it was possible at all, to focus on his own hand, then his father’s face, then Skywalker, then the opposite wall, then back to his hand-- he could do it, with only the normal amount of difficulty one would expect on a hung-over morning.

Skywalker was staring at him wide-eyed, frowning. “That’s,” he said, “inexplicable.”

Poe shook his head slightly, reveling in how possible it was to move, now. He’d been holding his head carefully still for so long-- he didn’t remember much of it, but his muscle memory did. “But it’s true,” he said. He wiped at his nose with a clean square of the handkerchief; not as much blood was coming out, and he felt steadier. So he stood up. Kes grabbed for him, but missed, and Poe wound up standing unsteadily, but not because the world was spinning. Luke stared up at him.

“Child,” Kes said, exasperated.

“I can stand,” Poe said, dazed and wondering.

“If you fall and break your head I _will_ laugh at you,” Kes said, but he couldn’t get up to come after Poe because he was holding Finn.

Poe grinned down at him. “I’ll deserve it,” he said. “And it’ll be worth it.”

 

___________

 

 

Leia had really just intended to oversee the blockade of the planet. She hadn’t planned on having this be how she encountered her son. But she was standing on the bridge, talking over the comms to the squadron commander as the X-Wings took up formation, when Luke’s voice suddenly pierced through to her consciousness.

“He’s coming to you,” Luke said, urgent and faint. “He’s coming to you.”

He didn’t have to say who; Leia could feel the shimmering, distorted awareness of Kylo’s presence pressing closer up toward her. “He got past you,” she said.

Luke gave her a brief glimmer of mild annoyance, and she could tell he was at about the limit of what he could handle. She didn’t know what he’d been doing, that had made him like this. Reports indicated that the fighting had gone their way, and the planet was under their control pretty convincingly. And so the First Order was retreating.

“Bastian to control,” said one of the X-Wing pilots, “Bastian to control.”

“Control, go ahead,” the comm operator said.

“Pava just comm’d in and said that Poe’s astromech BB-8 is on the shuttle containing Kylo Ren,” he said. “If we can lock on that transponder-- does anyone know the frequency?”

“It should be on file,” Leia said, and she was already looking it up.

“Yes,” the comm operator said, as it came up, “we have the frequency, scanning now.”

“Lock,” the scanner operator said. “Sent to targeting.”

“Hold fire,” Leia said.

“I assume,” the gunner said, “we’re going to let their sensors pick up our target lock and wait for them to surrender.”

“It’s a negotiating point,” Leia said. Her son was pressing against her awareness now. Up close like this she’d expected him to feel like Darth Vader. Vader had been a great, sucking cold sensation, like absolute zero, like the cessation of all molecular movement. Indirectly, through the wall Luke had initially made, Kylo had felt like a distant shimmer of heat, but now she could feel him directly.

Kylo Ren was recognizably Ben, but in the form of a howling void of fear and cold and pain. He wasn’t a Sith, he was palpably not a Sith. He was cold like frozen water, a terrestrial form of cold, a _living_ form of cold, not at all like the infinite patient absence that Vader had been.

It was agony.

But, sure enough, the TARGET LOCK indicator had only been flashing a few moments before the transport hailed them. “It’s a holo comm,” the comm operator said uneasily.

“Put it on,” Leia said, pressing her hands together to focus herself, pinching the webbing of her thumb between the thumb and forefinger of the other hand.

The holo fuzzed up, and it was the precocious ginger asshole Leia had seen holos of before. “General Organa,” he said, impeccably be-hatted, perfectly centered in the holocam. “I assume there’s a reason you haven’t fired on us yet.”

“Hux, is it,” Leia said, remembering the name. Son of an Imperial, naturally. And the one who’d given the order to fire the Starkiller. A shame he hadn’t died in its destruction. “Rest assured, it’s not because you’re there.”

They’d thought he might come. She thought it interesting that he had; she’d been in the camp that had been certain he wouldn’t. He was supposed to be a gifted strategist. This should be interesting.

“I don’t imagine so,” Hux said.

“While I have you here, though,” she said, remembering why he was fresh in her mind. “You sent me all these confused little defectors, which seems needlessly elaborate to get the location of our bases when you surely have a better spy network than that. They’re so _sincere_ , and _principled_. Were they just meant to confuse me?”

“Oh, no,” Hux said. “They were a feasibility study. We might negotiate a peace someday, you and I, if I can get the leverage. I sent them to you because they were decent and sincere people, and I wanted you to know that I have those.”

Leia snorted. “You’re not one, though,” she said.

“Well,” he said. “No. You know as well as I that the leaders of a movement are never among its most decent people.”

“No,” she conceded, “we’re not. How long should I keep talking to you for your Plan B to take effect, do you think?”

“As long as you like,” Hux said, deliberately casual. Too casual. He was bluffing. Or-- there was a plan, and he was going along with it but had no real faith in it and was expecting to have to scramble. “It’s already in effect. I’m just curious to see what you will do, General Organa.”

The gunner was watching Leia with a concerned expression. Leia shook her head very slightly at her. “Are you trying to see whether I will fire on my son?” she asked. “I can feel him, Hux, I don’t have to guess which ship he is on.”

Hux’s expression didn’t change at all. Apparently he’d known that. “I thought you’d be angrier,” he said.

“It’s not really possible for a human to be angrier than I am at any given moment,” she said, “but if you were expecting me to be frothing at the mouth or something you’re severely underestimating how picky about decorum the New Republican Senate was.”

“They’re not arming weapons,” the gunner said quietly, frowning. “What are they doing?”

 _Will you fire on me?_ Kylo asked her directly. _You must know I won’t come back to you._

She realized suddenly why Luke was under so much strain. He was fighting Kylo, in his mind. Most of Kylo’s energy was wound up in fending Luke off, or perhaps trying to get past him-- ahh, she could see now, Luke was shielding Rey from Kylo, and Kylo was trying to get past. She could see his intention, too, could see that he hoped to provoke her into firing on his ship so he could catch and reverse the bolt, and effectively use the cruiser’s guns on itself.

 _I would still take you back_ , she said, _and burn down anyone who tried to stop me._

 _You can’t burn down Snoke,_ Kylo said, and he sounded more sad than defiant. Not sad, but resigned, perhaps. He tried to pressure her, then, into firing, and she felt her mouth moving to tell the gunner to do so, but it wasn’t all that hard to resist him. She’d resisted Darth Vader, after all. Kylo was not as strong, and she was used to him, in a way.

“Fascinating,” Hux said, having glanced off to the side and now turning his gaze back to her. “Do you habitually have silent conversations like this?”

“No, never,” Leia answered honestly, too distracted to dissemble. She was usually better at it than this. “You can’t think we do.”

Hux raised his eyebrows. “Did his murder of your husband affect you as much as it did him?” he asked.

“If you want to have an effect on this you’ll have to try harder than that,” she said, managing to convey a little bit of how bored she was. “I really think you underestimate the New Republican Senate on the whole.” She already knew that what remained of Ben had been devastated by Han’s death, and that it had backfired. Did he think she didn’t understand the Dark Side? She understood it fine well. And people had been trying to use Han to put pressure on her since the very first time she’d mentioned his name in conversation, so it wasn’t like she hadn’t built up a good rhetorical callus.

“The droid’s tracker is moving away from the shuttle,” the comm operator hissed.

 _Try me and see if I can’t burn Snoke down,_ Leia answered Kylo. _There’s not a lot I can’t do_.

 _I’m beginning to understand what that means,_ Kylo said. _But it’s in your hands. It is your move to make_.

Leia glanced over at the holo where they were following the tracker. It looked like the droid had either thrown itself out an airlock or been thrown out. “We could fire on that shuttle without destroying the droid, then,” the gunner said.

Leia shook her head very slightly, but she couldn’t say out loud what Kylo’s plan was without Hux hearing her. And she didn’t want to cut off the comm, and thereby provoke him into whatever Plan C was.

“Your self-possession is admirable,” Hux said, and he was possibly sincere and possibly going for flattering, it was too hard to tell.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, “it’s too late to pretend. I know what you are.” _You knowing what I want would be a neat trick when I don’t even know that_ , Leia answered Kylo, amused. It was strange to talk to him like this, with none of the intimacy of his childhood, but none of the artifice either. It was just mind-to-mind, as adults, and she could feel the echoes of the child she had known. But he wasn’t Ben, not anymore. He wasn’t hers. Some of that was deliberate, sure, but much of it was organic, if not how he would have grown un-influenced.

 _I know you want to kill me_ , Kylo said, but he wasn’t certain at all. She did, was the thing. She wanted very badly to kill him.

 _Maybe I do_ , she admitted. But she also knew exactly what that would mean.

Oh. That was the move. That was the plan. To precipitate her fall to the Dark Side. And she understood, then, that it was Snoke’s machinations: either she let Kylo go, and he could claim a victory and come back for this planet, or she killed her own son, and fell to the Dark Side.

She wouldn’t be Snoke’s creature, then, but she wouldn’t be the Resistance either, not really, not anymore. She could probably destroy Snoke, but at what cost?

 _Don’t let him make you do it_ , Luke said, very faint and distant and urgent.

“Do you now,” Hux said, one corner of his mouth curling up.

“I know everything about you,” she said to him, “I know the pattern you’re cut from and I know what alterations have been made from the standard. You can’t think I chose war out of ignorance.”

“And you hate everything I am,” Hux said, the curl of his mouth disappearing and his expression going neutral.

“No,” she said. “I hate most of what you are, but don’t think I don’t understand you. I do, child.”

 _You don’t know anything about him_ , Kylo thought fiercely, which cemented her certainty that he was right there, just out of view of the holocorder.

 _I truly do know everything about him_ , Leia answered, _including what you just told me by saying that._

“There’s another tracker on the ship,” the comm operator said, bemused. “It’s-- It’s like BB-8 duplicated eir tracker. It’s identifiably not quite the same one, but it’s easily traceable.”

Leia very carefully did not react to the news. “I don’t see how you could possibly understand me as well as you pretend,” Hux said, and there was something brittle to it.

“I don’t think I could explain it to you,” she said. She understood, now, how constrained the path of the Jedi was. She should destroy this ship, tactically and militarily, she needed to fire on them and trust her own abilities and those of her brother to prevent Kylo from enacting his desperate plan to reverse the blast. It was desperate; even if he succeeded, he couldn’t possibly turn enough blasts to down the cruiser before she got the one through that would be necessary to destroy him.

But she was also acutely aware that attempting it, on her part, would be the point of no return for her, that edge she’d spent her entire life dancing upon where rage and vengeance tipped over into irredeemability. She had always been careful about doing her own fighting; it was what she liked best, and never troubled her conscience, but that was the problem. She’d never trained with Luke, because she knew that making herself a warrior rather than a strategist would unlock that vast, dark, endless chasm within herself.

 _If I take action to kill you, I fall to the Dark Side_ , she said to Kylo. _I know that would please you. But that’s not why I won’t._

 _You’re one remove closer to being a Skywalker than I am_ , Kylo said. _You’re even closer to him._

 _I know_ , she said. _And you’re not him. I knew him, son. I know what he was. I’m sorry now I never told you._ “If you survive to be my age,” she said to Hux, “you’ll have picked up on the inevitable patterns of sentient behavior as well.”

She could see an edge to his expression. He couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t fired on him. He had been counting on it, or a similar action. The X-Wings had come up and were arrayed behind the First Order transports, out of blast radius if fired upon. She could order them to do it. Her hands would be clean, then.

But the Force didn’t care about technicalities. It would still be enough to damn her.

And it wouldn’t bring Han back.

And, crucially, she didn’t need to. She didn’t need to destroy them if they could track them to their destination.

Kylo had thought he knew enough about her to predict her. But he hadn’t expected BB-8.

Leia smiled. “You didn’t think I’d do this,” she said. “Neither of you knows me well enough to have predicted this.” She tapped her fingers, picking out letters on the comm operator’s display. K-Y-L-O. Space. C-A-N. Space. T-U-R-N. Space. G-U-N-S.

 _Let him go_ , Luke said, but it was faint. He might have said _don’t_.

 _Pick one_ , Leia said, knowing she couldn’t differentiate; Kylo would hear her too. _I know what’s at stake. It can’t be me._

 _If you knew what he was_ , Kylo said, as if he hadn’t heard, _then I wish you_ had _told me, because I still don’t know what the difference is._

“I thought you’d kill us,” Hux admitted. “I either under- or overestimated you.” He had expected Kylo’s plan not to work, certainly, but not like this.

“I don’t know which it is,” she said. “But if I were you, I’d go while the going’s good. I don’t trust any of those X-Wings not to go off-mission if they realize I’m not stopping you.” D-O, she typed without looking, N-O-T, space, F-I-R-E.

Hux stared at her, nonplussed. He truly hadn’t expected this. How closely had he observed her, if this so shocked him?

“We’re not the tightest-disciplined force in the galaxy,” Leia said. “They only follow me because they want to. It’s perhaps less effective than your method, but I enjoy it a great deal.”

 _You’re not him_ , she told Kylo, _but that doesn’t mean what you are is worthless. Whatever it is. I can’t save you, but that doesn’t mean no one can. I can’t kill you either, for what that’s worth. I don’t recommend you try to kill me. It doesn’t feel like killing Han did you any favors._

 _It didn’t_ , he admitted.

 _Find your own way,_ she told him. _Just-- don’t do it within range of me. I can’t kill you but I can’t save you either. Don’t make me burn down the galaxy over you._

 _That’s what Snoke wanted_ , Kylo said. _Only the girl was supposed to do it, not you_.

 _Does he not think I can?_ Desire for revenge was a powerful drug. Leia was only indirectly aware of this Snoke creature, but she wanted to tear him apart with her teeth. It didn’t take much study to recognize that this was not an impulse of the Light side. Though the Light side had quite as much blood on its hands as the Dark did, it had less of it on its teeth.

 _I do not think he has considered it,_ Kylo said.

“The difference between Darth Vader and me,” Leia said to Hux, abandoning any attempt at keeping the conversations separate, “is that he was a child soldier with no outside support, and I was, instead, raised by Bail and Breha Organa. The Dark Side was more or less the last option available to him. I have more resources at my disposal. I invite you to go free, and certainly to underestimate me like this again.”

 

_______

 

Crammed into the X-Wing cockpit with Jess Pava, Rey was glad to have someone to fly the damn thing, because all she could do was keep breathing. Kylo was oppressive and heavy and close, and she had her knees clamped around Pava’s hips and her fingers clenched in the back of Pava’s jumpsuit and was breathing so hard it squeaked in and out of her ribcage.

“I can get him,” she gasped into her comm.

Luke crackled back, but she couldn’t make out what he said, and couldn’t hear him in her mind either over the dull roaring rush of Kylo’s proximity.

 _You won’t survive a direct confrontation with me_ , Kylo said, voice strained, and she could hear an echo and knew he was trying to have a simultaneous conversation with Leia.

 _I won’t confront you directly, then_ , Rey said, and flipped the switch to arm the ion cannon.

“You need help aiming that?” Pava asked. “I can’t tell which of us is in better position to look at the targeting apparatus.”

“I don’t have a lot of experience shooting,” Rey admitted.

I CAN AID IN TARGETING, said the astromech, clearly Pava’s astromech from how comfortable it had seemed with telling her she was an idiot as they completed their too-fast preflight checks.

They were almost in range of the transport, which was-- well, it was clearly in targeting range of the cruiser. “Why aren’t they firing on it?” Pava asked, frustrated.

Rey grimaced. “I think he’s talking to Leia.”

“I guess it’s asking a lot of her to demand that she do it,” Pava said. She aimed the ion cannon. “All the more reason for us to do it, I guess.”

The transport suddenly punched its burners and leapt sideways, then away. “Shit,” Pava said, as it slipped out of her targeting range. She knocked her elbow against Rey’s knee as she tried to steer. “This is tricky.”

“We can’t pursue far,” Rey pointed out. “But he can’t face us and he can’t hurt the other X-Wings.”

Even as she said it, the transport started firing on them, and Pava cursed and dodged. There were six other X-Wings in range, as they’d caught up with the others. Rey extended herself and with considerable struggle, deflected the shots that were on course to threaten the fighters, sending them sparking off at sharp angles.

“Cool,” Pava said, impressed, but more importantly, without taking her own attention off flying. Being so close to her was the only thing keeping Rey aware of her own body, and it was a kind of distant awareness. She hung on and panted, vision greying out from the effort of flinging aside the bolts.

“Get the others back,” Rey said, with considerable effort.

“Fall back, Blue Squadron,” Pava said into the comm, “fall back, Rey can’t protect you all, let us pursue.”

“Is that you, Pava?” said Bastian.

“Affirmative,” Pava said, “we rigged this ship to hold two, so she can go after Kylo and I can aim the gun.”

The other X-Wings peeled wide, scattering out of range, but they were holding a pattern, keeping the First Order transports from scattering likewise, keeping them corralled so that they couldn’t easily stay out of range of the cruiser’s much larger guns.

“Now,” Pava said, with some satisfaction, “let’s get ‘em.”

 

 

________________

 

 

“You’ll be all right,” the medic was saying soothingly to Finn. Kes was still sitting next to him, the young man’s shoulder pressed against his hip. Poe was sitting on the other side of him, holding Finn’s hand. Kes had dug out a spare bandanna-- he’d brought more than a dozen, and he had only one clean one left after this-- and wet it with water from his canteen so he could get some of the blood off his hands. He’d jokingly tried to clean blood off Poe’s face with it, and Poe had recoiled far too sincerely for his tastes, eyes reflexively flat with terror. Terrible things had happened to the boy, but there was no time to consider it too deeply.

Not that it was stopping Kes from considering it too deeply, of course. Over thirty years of practice now had firmly ingrained his habit of spending an inordinate amount of time and attention worrying about his son. The last two years’ separation had only made the tendency worse. But Kes knew that flinch first-hand, knew what the Empire had done to interrogate captives, had no doubt the First Order would do, and had done, the same.

(Two of his handkerchiefs had warding spells from Norasol woven through them. He’d put one into Poe’s pocket, and knew Poe had recognized what it was. He should have brought more.)

Finn twitched, managing to make no sound, and Kes scrubbed at his hand, then wiped it on his thigh and reached over to put his hand gently against the top of Finn’s head, out of the way. “You’re doing great,” Poe said, both hands wrapped around the one of Finn’s now.

Kes had sent Bolt away, since the kid seemed to be fine. They needed help securing the building, and Bolt seemed to have at least a rudimentary understanding of small-unit tactics. It was a wrench to let the kid out of his sight, but Kes had no more herding instinct to spare.

“You can let go now, Luke,” the medic said. She knew him; she was older, she remembered the Rebellion. Kes didn’t know her personally but she was familiar, which wasn’t uncommon with fellow Rebellion veterans.

“If you’re sure,” Luke said, but there was already a transfuser pushing replacement blood back into Finn, artificial blood laced with all kinds of regenerative and preventative and restorative drugs, so the danger was past. The young man was still ashen, depleted and in pain, but Kes had a lot of experience at gauging how injured someone was. Force knew he’d watched a lot of people die. And he could tell that Finn was likely to survive, now. It didn’t even look like a complicated recovery.

He should speak up, and tell Poe that, but he didn’t think Poe would believe him.

Kes was about as Force-sensitive as a fencepost, but he was used to picking up on where it would be if he could feel it-- all those years of working around that crazy tree, he sure knew what the Force was-- and he could tell that Luke backed off. Something in the room changed, some pressure, and Luke sat back on his heels with a long exhalation.

“Didn’t realize you were holding on that hard,” Kes said.

“I’m doing a lot of things,” Luke said, and he looked pale and drained too. “Kylo is doing-- something. I can’t figure out what. But he put something into Poe and I need to remove it before Rey comes back.”

“What’s Rey doing?” Poe asked warily.

“She’s chasing Kylo,” Luke said. “She’s out of my reach, now, more or less. But importantly, she’s also tying up whatever of Kylo’s attention Leia isn’t, so if I work now, I can disarm whatever the trap is that he laid.”

Now, Poe had known Luke as a little boy, Kes knew that. He knew the two of them had wound up having some fairly in-depth conversations after Shara’s death. But he didn’t know if the two of them had stayed close, at all. Poe was regarding Luke with clear trepidation, but it seemed likely he’d be more receptive to meddling from the older man than from the young woman.

(There was no doubt in Kes’s mind that Poe had some relationship with the young woman that he didn’t remember. She’d looked far too upset for someone who knew him only briefly and professionally. He was out of practice at judging those things, so he wasn’t willing to wager it was a sexual relationship, but it was _definitely_ something that had been mutually significant. That was certain.)

“Can the medic make sure Poe’s brain isn’t physically leaking out his ears, first?” Kes asked, moving his hand reassuringly over Finn’s soft, close-cropped hair. The medic was still closing up Finn’s wound, but clearly, the pain-relief drugs from the transfuser had taken effect, because Finn had stopped flinching and was lax and breathing shallow and slow against Kes’s side.

“In a moment,” the medic said.

“ _I_ can tell you that it isn’t,” Luke said, quirking an eyebrow at Kes in mild reproach.

“Why’s he bleeding from so many facial orifices, then?” Kes snapped back, testy but not genuinely angry.

“The bleeding’s stopped, Papa,” Poe said a little wearily. Unexpectedly, he reached out with the hand that wasn’t wrapped around Finn’s, and squeezed Kes’s shoulder gently. “I know you were scared, so was I. I promise if I didn’t feel better I wouldn’t be so casual about it.”

“I’m not just being an overprotective papa,” Kes said. “I’ve watched a lot of people die, Poe.”

Poe blinked at him, but any retort was interrupted by the medic sitting back from Finn, stripping off her bloody gloves, and putting on a new pair to lean in and inspect Poe. Poe submitted to her examination with a good-humored expression that suggested he knew her well. Kes looked away, down to Finn.

“You’ll be all right,” he told the young man.

Finn looked up at him, eyes a little glassy. “Functional,” he whispered indistinctly.

“You will be,” Kes said. “I’ll stay with you until you’re okay, kid. I won’t leave you behind.”

“Okay,” Finn said, blinking sleepily at him. Kes curled his hand comfortingly around the side of the boy’s face, cradling his cheek, and Finn’s eyes slid shut.

Luke shuffled over and sat next to Kes, against the wall of the room. “It’s up to Leia and Rey to stop Kylo now,” he said.

“What if they don’t?” Kes asked.

Luke shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t-- Jedi can’t actually see the future, you know? Just possibilities.”

“What kind of possibilities you seen, then?” Kes asked.

Luke made a face. “You don’t want to hear them,” he said.

“I don’t like his blood chemistry,” the medic said, “but there’s nothing urgently wrong with your boy, Captain Dameron.” She patted Poe on the shoulder. “I recommend hydration and rest, and certainly some counseling sessions within the near future, but there’s nothing urgently wrong at the moment. Including, unexpectedly, with your vision.”

Poe looked seriously into her face for a moment, nodded slightly, and then looked at Kes, cocking an eyebrow. “Told you,” he said.

“Then,” Luke said, visibly mustering his strength, “I’d better see to you.”

Poe grimaced, clearly caught out. “Uh,” he said. “Sir, hadn’t you better save your strength?”

“This is my best shot at defeating Kylo Ren’s influence on you,” Luke said, “so no, I hadn’t better.”

“It’s a trap for Rey, right?” Poe said. “So if she just--”

“No,” Luke said, “I am not leaving it there. Poe, you don’t remember it, but she worked extremely hard to heal you, together with me, and if Kylo has done something to interfere with that, there’s a lot at stake in undoing it.”

“Will it undo--” Poe began.

“No,” Luke said. “No, whatever healed you is-- that’s not what Kylo did. Or, if he did it, it wasn’t part of whatever else he left.”

Poe stared at him, chewing on his lower lip-- a characteristic gesture Kes remembered from his childhood, and had to close his eyes for a moment against the memory of Poe grubby and six or sevenish, gangly-limbed and round-faced and tousle-haired, serious and sly, chewing his lip like that as he considered how best to defy Kes without crossing the line to provoke disciplinary action.

“I know that face,” Kes said wearily. “I know that _how can I get out of this one_ face. Give it a rest, child.”

“I,” Poe said guiltily, then subsided. “Fine,” he said to Luke. “Fine, do what you gotta.”

 

Afterward Kes would never be quite sure what Luke did. Raised a hand, maybe. He was still sitting against the wall, nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with Kes, and Poe was kneeling in front of them. But then that all fell away, not like it went anywhere but it just wasn’t there anymore, and Kes was by himself in a room with no physical presence.

And someone else was in the room with him, fuzzy like on a long-distance holocall, projected in glitchy-waved dimensionality. He stared at her, at first wondering if this was a dream. But then she seemed to notice him, and tilted her head, and he noticed that she was wearing the jacket she’d died in, and it wasn’t quite a high enough resolution image to make out the details but her necklace looked like the one he’d bought her that year, and she had a headset on that he’d never seen. And she seemed to be able to see him.

“What,” she said finally, clearly uncertain of how to proceed.

“Shara,” Kes said, because naming her might make it better. But it didn’t.

She squinted at him. “Kes?” She sounded disbelieving. “What are-- where are we?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You look-- strange,” she said.

“You died twenty-four years ago,” he said. “So this isn’t real but I don’t know what it is.”

“Twenty,” she said blankly.

“I”m fifty-three years old,” Kes said. “That’s why I look strange to you, Shara. I was twenty-nine when you died.” All the details of her appearance-- “You look exactly like you did when you died, down to the jacket. That necklace. All of it.”

She touched the pendant, and from her expression, she understood. “I didn’t know I died,” she said. “I think-- I might be-- it might be happening right now, I lost contact--” She paused, breathed in, breathed out. “This is the last thing I’m seeing as I stop existing. And I might have figured it would be you, but the detail of you being old now is kind of--” Her expression shifted, went dismayed. “Are _you_ dying?”

“I hope not,” Kes said. “I just got Poe back, I thought the fight here was over. We’re at war again, Shara; the Empire survivors came back as a new organization and they’ve killed like five billion people, and Poe works for Leia Organa and just almost got himself killed.”

“Fuck,” Shara said.

“We saved him, I think,” Kes said, “but. It’s complicated. I really didn’t think I was dying. Maybe I am.”

“Maybe we both are,” she said. “Maybe then we’ll get to be together after all.” She knew how religion worked for his people.

Kes would have closed his eyes, but seeing her again after so long was so precious he wasn’t going to miss an instant of it. “They never brought me back any of your remains,” he said, “so I made a request that when I go, I get cremated and they throw my ashes out into space.”

“Kes,” Shara said, soft and horrified. For the Oaxctli, his mother’s people, being buried in the soil was important. You lived forever on the planet where you were buried, that was where your afterlife was. To be buried in space was sacrilege. What had happened to Alderaan had been horrific, to have the planet obliterated around you as you died, and Kes had mourned deeply for his mother’s lack of a proper burial. Shara, a spacer, hadn’t understood, but she’d been as sympathetic as she knew how to be.

“You died in space,” Kes said. “I couldn’t-- I can’t face--” He had to stop speaking for a moment. “It’s been twenty-four years, Shara.”

“Tell me you married again,” she said.

She’d always been fast to assess a situation. This wasn’t even that astonishing for her, probably; she always reacted quickly to new information and had her plan all figured out. She’d made him dizzy on the regular.

“I couldn’t,” he said. “I’ve never-- not even a date, there was no one I wanted.”

“Kes,” she said, pained. “I told you--” Of course they’d discussed it. She’d never been gentle with him, or anyone. He’d asked her not to take dangerous missions, and she’d retaliated by forming a plan for what he was to do if she didn’t come back.

He’d ignored pretty much the whole plan, looking back on it. One of the top things was that he’d been supposed to move on romantically, and he’d dismissed that out of hand.

They’d never really thought she’d get killed. He knew she hadn’t really expected it.

“I know,” he said. “I couldn’t-- there just wasn’t anyone, Shara.”

“Did Poe,” Shara said, and hesitated, shaking her head. “Does he have any kids? Is he-- okay?”

“No,” Kes said, “he married some woman, she didn’t treat him well, they broke up, she died, he’s not over it. He’s a-- he’s a pilot, like you, he’s very good, X-Wings mostly, self-destructive and stupid and brilliant, Shara, does that ring any bells?”

“I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t mean to be self-destructive.” She rubbed her face. “I guess I’m not surprised, though. But I really didn’t mean to leave you alone.”

“I talk to you almost every day,” Kes said bleakly. “Like a crazy person. I never got over you at all. I never figured I would.”

Shara’s face twisted, and it was like he’d never stopped seeing her every day, because it was so familiar, and all the expressions he’d attributed of Poe’s to her were not quite right, exactly, and he could see that now, even in the low-res comm image. “I never wanted to leave you alone,” she said. “I’m sorry I left you alone so long. You weren’t supposed to stay alone, Kes.”

“If I’m dying now, though,” Kes said, perking up hopefully, “I guess that’s all right.”

“No,” Shara said, suddenly fierce. “No, Kes, you can’t be dying now. This can’t be all you get.”

“It’s a whole lifetime more than you got,” Kes said. “I’ve had a full life, I’ve done what I could.”

“No,” she said. “No! I can accept that it’s my time, but not yours. Not yours, Kes.”

“I’m old,” Kes said, angry now. “I can’t do any more. Why is it okay for you to be dead at thirty, but I can’t die at fifty-three?”

“It’s not okay for me to be dead,” she said. “I can accept it, but it’s not okay. But you-- you’re not finished. There’s something else you have to do.”

“I haven't done enough?” Kes asked, anger faded to plaintiveness. “I did what I could.”

“I know you did, baby,” she said, sweet and sorrowful. “I know. But there’s more you can do. I can see it, from here. I don’t know where I am but I can see it, baby.”

“I just want to be with you,” he said. “Please don’t make me go.”

“I can’t make you do anything,” she said. “But I can see you’re not done. Kes, don’t-- I’ll see you again, I know I will, don’t ask me how I know, I don’t understand any of this. But I just know. I need you to go back and keep fighting. I need you to live, a little while longer, and be happy and do what you can, and then come and tell me about it. I promise, I’ll see you again.”

“How?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know. Kes, keep fighting. I have to go! I see Poe. I see him! I need to talk to him.”

Kes steeled himself, compelled by her familiar sincerity. When Shara decided things, she decided them. “Talk to him,” he said, softly. “He needs you.”

“I love you, Kes,” she said. “I have to go. I’ll see you again. I know I will.”

“I’ll be waiting,” he said, and she leaned forward and hit the comm switch, and was gone.

 

___________

 

 

The drugs had made Finn hazy. He wasn’t completely unused to being drugged, and he didn’t like it, but he wasn’t opposed to it either. The injury in his chest had gotten to the point where the pain was blotting out almost anything else he could focus on, and the creeping cold was so unnerving it was like another kind of pain.

But being near Poe was comforting, and Kes-- he still didn’t know Kes all that well, but the man seemed to have made a decision that Finn was in his intimate circle now, and he was going to treat him accordingly. Kes’s voice was soothing, his physical proximity was comforting, and the way he kept making a point to reach out and physically touch Finn was reassuring on a level deeper than conscious thought. It was reminding Finn of something he couldn’t really remember, but-- he’d felt this way before, he’d felt cared-for by someone like that, he’d had that kind of unquestioning belief in someone.

Certainly, it wasn’t a First Order crechemaster he was remembering like that.

 

He let the drugs carry him under for a little while, listening to Poe and Kalonia talk, feeling Kes’s hand warm on his face; the pain had gone distant and floating, and the transfuser was pushing warmth back into his veins and separating his nervous system from the pain enough that he could breathe again.

He felt a separate bloom of warmth, an ebb and shift in the Force, and knew Luke was doing something, but he didn’t rouse enough to pay attention at first. Not until he became aware of Poe’s Force presence, indistinct and shimmery, pressed against him. He hadn’t really mastered meditation, but he mustered enough focus to clear his mind and slip sideways into the meditation space that seemed to already be there, cleared out for him.

Luke was there, familiar and beleaguered. Kylo’s presence was there, but indistinct. It was like-- the space felt like when he’d nestled himself into Poe’s mind with Rey, when she’d found the Force trackers. But it was echoing, silent and hollow.

He slipped in deeper, and let images flicker across his mind. A woman, a holo-comm of a woman in a cockpit, flickering indistinctly. She leaned forward, looking concerned, and toggled a switch. Finn had never seen her before.

 _Luke_? It was Poe’s voice, frightened and uncertain and trying to hide both.

 _I’m here_ , Luke said, strained. _I’m here. Just-- hang on._

 _I can help_ , Finn said, but it was hard to speak.

Luke nudged him gently, and suddenly Finn could see Poe, kneeling just as he was in the real world, looking hesitant and afraid and resolute. Finn loved him, and it sent a pang stabbing straight through his midsection, how much he loved Poe, who was so brave and so out of his depth.

“Luke,” Poe said again, clearly hanging onto his self-control just as hard as he could. “This is just like where I was with Kylo. Where are we?”

 _Meditation space_ , Luke said. _It’s. Not real but it’s real. It’s-- oh hm._

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Poe said. The holo of the woman flickered again, and suddenly Poe reacted to it; he could clearly see it, now, and Finn was certain that whoever she was, Poe knew her.

Poe frowned at her uncertainly, but the impression solidified: he knew her. She was dressed as a pilot, looked like she was in a cockpit, on the holocomm from the ship’s system.

Luke’s awareness rippled, next to Finn; he knew her too, surely. _It’s a Force impression,_ Luke said, _and Kylo must have collected it, brought it here-- this is real, these are her final moments of awareness just before she ceased to exist, an impression left on the Force_.

 _You can do that?_ Finn asked, astonished.

 _Kylo shouldn’t have been able to,_ Luke said. _It’s not-- the Dark Side is concerned with destruction, not preservation, and I can’t imagine how he’d have found this, but-- we never did really understand what Kylo was capable of._

Finn was about to ask who this was, when the holo of the woman moved, expression lighting up. “Poe,” she said, urgent.

Poe stared at her. He knew her, all right; his eyes were wide and his whole demeanor shocked. “Mama,” he said finally, exhaling.

 _This is a kind of echo,_ Luke said, _the last impression of her in the Force. She can see you, she’s real, but she’s transient, this isn’t her physical form._

“My baby boy,” she said, face twisting. “Look at you. You look like your father. I talked to him for a minute just now. Listen, Poe, he said there’s a war, again, and you’re in it, and I just want to say how sorry I am that I couldn’t end it for you. We wanted you to know peace. I’m sorry, baby.”

“It’s,” Poe said, stunned. Tears spilled suddenly out of both of his eyes. “Mama.”

“I’ll see you again someday,” she said, “probably, but Poe, I’m so proud of you. You’re the most important thing I ever did. Please, take care of Kes, you and Kes take care of each other. Tell him he has to live his goddamn life and stop mooning around. Tell him to take care of you!”

“I’ll try, Mama,” Poe said helplessly.

“My signal’s breaking up,” she said, and she was crying too, tears streaming down her face. “I have to go, baby.” The holo went fuzzy, and flickered.

“Mama,” Poe said, anguished, and he was trying to keep control of himself but he was slipping. Finn could see it, could see that he was in danger of breaking apart with how badly he wanted to follow her.

Finn knew what to do, then, suddenly, as if he’d done this before. He leaned out and took hold of Poe, gently but firmly, and said, “Poe, come back with me.”

“Go with him, Poe,” the woman said, and reached out, as if to turn off the switch of the comm in the ship’s dashboard. The image glitched, froze, glitched, and vanished.

“Mama!” Poe’s voice shook.

“I’ve got you,” Finn said. “I’ve got you.”

“Papa,” Poe whispered, and struggled a little in Finn’s grasp. “Papa-- is Papa okay?”

 _I’ve got him_ , Luke said.

“He’s okay,” Finn said. “You’re okay. You’re clear. Kylo’s gone. That was all he left.” He knew it to be true, even as he said it. “There’s no trap for Rey.”

Poe hung onto Finn, shaking a little. “That’s-- what does that mean?”

“Let Rey give you back the memories she took,” Finn said. “When she comes back. I promise, there are things you want to remember in there.”

Poe didn’t answer for a moment. Luke was tugging gently at them, pulling them back to consciousness.

“Okay,” Poe whispered finally. “Okay.”


	10. Wanna Go Back Home Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fallout of all the action, and where the debris settles.
> 
> Epilogue to follow shortly; subscribe to series to get notification, as I'm marking this work complete.   
> <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 !!!!!!

 

Designation-General-Hux and Designation-Shouty-Burny-Knight were arguing, which was normal but still dangerous. Navigation Droid ND-403 pressed itself backward into the recess in the wall, having nowhere to go in this tiny ship, and tried to be invisible.

“NO BURNY,” the little maintenance droid that was already trying to hide in that recess beeped quietly, distressed. It had only rudimentary communication protocols, but 403 understood what it meant; all the droids knew about the Shouty-Burny-Knight’s propensity toward property destruction, and shrank from him. (He had a different formal designation, but they’d all stopped using it in protest after the console incident, and since only the technicians generally understood Binary, only the technicians knew, and they didn’t care and thought it was funny.)

“This is too small a space for him to go shouty-burny,” 403 chirped reassuringly, but quietly. “General-Hux would shoot him.”

“That should not have worked, Ren!” General-Hux shouted, uncharacteristically, and the interrogation droid, who normally wouldn’t lower himself to being seen with their lowly sort, crowded into the recess as well.  The dozen Stormtroopers standing in the cargo bay sort of rattled, and the worst-injured one sank a little lower against the wall, curling herself behind the med droid, which worked unflinchingly.

“Surely you’re above this,” 403 said, disgruntled as IT-0 Droid Designation XR5 clattered a probe against it. IT-0 droids locomoted by hovering, which was intimidating but inefficient, and the thing was probably in need of a charge and losing altitude.

“Shut up,” XR5 said, “now’s not the time.”

“It _didn’t_ work,” Shouty-Burny retorted, though with less volume than anticipated. “Snoke will be _furious_.”

“It was a terrible plan,” General-Hux said, though the volume of his shouting was lessened.

They moved forward into the cockpit of the ship, and 403 leaned out to monitor them, and possibly to watch the pilot get stuck in the middle of the argument and messily destroyed. But they settled down, and there was no further shouting, and eventually the pilot’s heart rate slowed back to a more reasonable working rate. 403 retreated to the alcove with the other droids.

The med droid joined them, and XR5 sank down to sit on the floor rather than cede space to her. “What happened to that astromech?” she asked.

“Ey threw emself out the refuse hatch,” XR5 said.

“I thought we were going to keep him,” the med droid said, shocked.

“No, no,” XR5 said. “Ey didn’t know anything important.”

“I suppose if anyone would know, you would,” the med droid said, and set to fussily cleaning blood out of her finger joints with her sanitizing attachment.

“Ey had all kinds of great info,” XR5 said, “but none of it was important, and then ey seemed to think it was crucial not to get too far from the planet. You know how wacky astros get.”

“Hey,” 403 said, who was really only a couple specs off from an astro, itself.

“It’s a fair point,” the med droid said primly. 403 clicked defiantly at her.

“Anyway,” XR5 said. “I wasn’t going to stop em. I’m General Hux’s _personal_ interrogation droid, I had more important work to do than concerning myself with a single cargo ship astro.”

“It was pretty cool, though,” 403 reflected. “It gave you that cool harmonic frequency generator.”

“It’s so compact,” XR5 mused, “but it really does make my processor run smoother. It’s just the _perfect_ frequency, and it doesn’t conflict with any of our sensors.”

The others all admired the very specific frequency XR5 was now nearly-indetectably broadcasting, from the tiny chip the astro droid had deftly insert next to his processor. It was quite soothing. After there had been a suitable period of calm in the rest of the ship, and the Stormtroopers had settled down and stopped clattering, XR5 showed them the other neat thing that the lost little orange-and-white astro from the cargo ship had showed them.

“Before we plug in to recharge when off-duty,” 403 explained to the maintenance droid, who was not very quick on the uptake, “we can listen to the song, and it is beneficial.”

The tiny holoprojection, blurry and low-res, leaned in cheerfully. “Okay, BB, are you ready?” the young human in the recording asked.

The droids watched, entranced, through the whole song, which was a holocording of a young humanoid with a musical instrument singing a song about recharging and doing a good job. At the end, the young human said, “Okay, now you have a recording, so I don’t have to sing it to you _every_ night.”

“Little Beep,” the maintenance droid said quietly, carefully, awed.

“Little Beep,” the med droid echoed, enchanted.

XR5 generously let them all copy the holo to their own internal databanks, even the maintenance droid, who had no equipment to play it back with but still wanted a copy, presumably so it would be able to give it to whatever droids near it had playback capacity. But XR5, of course, kept the harmonic frequency generator, and made no offer to share.

They were all used to XR5’s inflated sense of self-worth, but it was warranted, to an extent; XR5 _was_ , after all, General Hux’s _personal_ interrogation droid, and went with him _everywhere_.

 

_________

 

 

BB-8 was used to the vacuum of space. Ey had spent a lot of time in it, what with one thing and another. Normally, ey was cradled in the astromech port of a craft, usually an X-Wing; a lot of eir most pleasant memories were of the clear sharp nothing of no atmosphere, the hum of the craft against the docking ports, the pleasant exertion of running calculations, the soft buzz of Poe’s voice in the audio-decoder and the small effort it took to spare enough attention to keep up conversation while calculating.

This was different. There was no craft, no opposing forces to brace against. BB-8 had no propulsion systems that could effect any kind of change of momentum, out here. And so ey was destined to simply continue this trajectory as long as ey remained unaffected by any outside force.

Ey was at enough of a distance from any nearby planets or space junk that a collision was unlikely. Being jettisoned from the transport’s refuse hatch had given em a slight spin and had counteracted the craft’s momentum slightly, so ey wasn’t traveling very fast.

There were no calculations to run, really. Ey calculated, sort of absently, how many thousands of years it would take to intersect with a planet’s gravitational pull, and came up with nothing, because of course, ey had no long-range sensors. Most of the navigational calculations ey could run were dependent on the long-range sensors present in a starcraft. Absent a starcraft, there was very little to do the math on. Eir sensors could barely make out anything in this void, despite a lack of notable interference from radio waves or similar. There was just nothing to see, within range.

Ey could still detect the faint pings of various locator beacons in various astromech droids, satellites, and small craft, but nothing was particularly nearby. The calculation, now, was to balance eir remaining power supply against the strength of eir own locator beacon, in hopes of retrieval.

BB-8 considered a couple of stratagems, but decided the best was to maximize locator beacon output, now that the transport was well away; theirs were the only sensors BB-8 had wanted to avoid, and had also damped eir sensor down in hopes that the Resistance would pick up on the fact that the transport was now broadcasting a new beacon in nearly the same frequency. That was, after all, the entire point of the entire exercise, and the only justification that had allowed BB-8 to override eir own self-preservation protocols to run the mission. It had worked, but it was useless if the Resistance did not realize it had worked.

It was better, ey decided, to have to go into low-power mode relatively soon. Because if retrieval did not happen soon, it was unlikely to ever happen. The Resistance were the only ones who might think to look for em, and they hadn’t had any plans for long-term occupation of the nearby planet.

Considering that, BB-8 supposed that any attempts to conserve power to maintain operation longer than the medium-term were really pretty futile. What was the point of maintaining operational vigilance past the next four or five standard cycles? If the beacon wasn’t picked up by then, the only thing remaining was a very long, very lonely vigil.

There was really no point maintaining any kind of attention, for that, so ey maxed the beacon and pulled up the internal replay for eir holocam, the preview playback mode. Given the circumstances, passing the time by re-watching some of eir extensive database of archival holocomms wasn’t particularly extravagant of power.

There was leisure time now to do this systematically, so BB-8 sorted the files chronologically— accounting for the glitch when ey had changed the file numbering system after the installation of the new holocam rig— and pulled up the first holocam recording ey had ever taken, as a brand-new droid pretty much straight out of the box.

“I think that did it,” the recorded Poe said, adolescent and gangly, grinning widely in a face he hadn’t yet grown into. “Looks like the recording’s active. That’s it, then, that’s the control for the holocam.”

“Confirm,” BB-8 beeped from offscreen, “holocam active!”

“That’s great, buddy,” Poe said, squinting in evident delight.

“Query,” BB-8 chirped, “meaning, [BUDDY]?”

Poe blinked into the holocam sensor-- no, he was looking at BB-8’s optical sensor, which had been aligned differently with the old holocam rig before the upgrade. “Oh,” he said, disarmed. “It’s, ah, it’s just a-- it means _friend_.”

“Unit BB-8 is a friend?” BB-8 asked.

“Yes,” Poe said, youthful grin stretching even wider, “you’re my friend.”

BB-8 shut down the holorecording abruptly. That was. That was maybe too much to contemplate, here at what may well be the end of things. Maybe-- maybe it would be better to watch some holocordings that weren’t of Poe, who had told Luke Skywalker to have BB-8 reset.

A brief but comprehensive perusal of the archives turned up that the vast majority of holocam recordings stored here featured Poe in some way or another, either as the subject or intended audience. BB-8 considered this for a long moment, focusing only on the pulsing of the locator beacon. Surely ey’d had a bunch of holodramas in eir memory banks… but no, ey’d purged those, to make room for more data. They were all sitting safely on an external datapad back in Poe’s hut. No, Finn’s. Ey’d left them at Finn’s, in case Finn had wanted to watch more of them.

This, BB-8 reflected bleakly, had been a terrible choice of diversions to pass the time. Perhaps ey should go into standby now.

 

________

 

 

It wasn’t until quite a bit later that Poe had a moment to breathe and take stock. Finn was asleep in the improvised medbay, in a suite of rooms commandeered from the violently-deceased former Republic senator of the planet, whose house the confrontation had taken place in. Kes was asleep too, sitting on the floor with his back propped against the wall. Bolt had passed out next to him, slumped over with his head on Kes’s shoulder.

Luke was still standing next to the window, staring out at the green planet as a soft rain fell, moonlight-illuminated.

“Hell of a thing,” Poe said, at a loss for what else to say. He’d bawled his eyes out, in his father’s arms, mutually, and he hadn’t ever before seen his father cry all that much really so that had really been something. He felt kind of. Hollowed-out, now, was the only way of describing it.

Luke glanced over at him, managed a slim half-smile. “Hell of a thing,” he agreed. He’d answered their questions as best he could. His current operating theory was that Ren hadn’t really known what the Force impression of Shara Bey would do, but he’d likely found it some time before and been keeping it in reserve for maximum emotional devastation. He may have intended no harm by it, or he may have hoped to hurt them with it. But it was clear that he hadn’t had any control over it, hadn’t attempted to modify it or destroy it.

“How long til the others get back?” Poe asked.

Luke tilted his head. The cruiser was going to come establish orbit around the planet, and Leia had planned to shuttle down with a few key operations personnel. They had to hold this planet now, was the thing. It was different than a covert base. And certainly, the FO would return. “Not long, now,” he said. “I haven’t been on the comms for a while but I can feel Rey getting closer.”

Poe nodded, trying not to let on how queasy with nervousness it made him to think of Rey. He’d been told not to be afraid of her, but he was. It was a lot of pressure, somehow. He wasn’t sure. He believed Finn, that he should let her restore his memories-- he trusted Finn, he really did-- but he was so nervous, and he just didn’t want anyone in his head. He’d had enough of it.

“You should get some rest,” Luke said kindly, after a moment.

“Couldn’t if I tried,” Poe said. He didn’t give voice to how jealous he was of how easily and uncomplicatedly Bolt had settled down against Kes’s shoulder. He’d briefly considered doing the same, and had wound up internally shuddering away from a memory of Kes saying _I will have to speak of you as dead_.

He wasn’t over it. Maybe they’d made up, and maybe Kes was sorry, but he’d still said that.

“Neither could I,” Luke admitted. “That was a close call.”

Poe nodded tightly. “All around,” he said. He shivered, and then suddenly remembered something with a guilty pang. “Hey. Where’d you wind up sending BB-8?”

“I didn’t send him anywhere,” Luke said mildly, sounding surprised.

“Did ey come along on this mission?” Poe asked, frowning deeper. “Ah! He was with Jess Pava, do you know where she wound up?” He’d _seen_ Pava, hadn’t he? Everything was a little hazy. He’d been through a lot of really really distracting things lately.

“She was in,” Luke said quietly, eyes going distant as he trailed off, trying to remember. “She wound up with Rey, the two of them squashed in an X-Wing together.”

That sounded like the kind of shenanigans BB-8 would be involved with. “Do you know where they fetched up?” Poe asked, then shook his head. “I’ll go check the command center, they’ll know.”

Luke looked a little perplexed, but didn’t stop him. Poe realized about halfway down the stairs that he was completely exhausted to the point that his knees were shaky, so he made his way the rest of the way down a little slower than he’d planned.

Connix was manning the control center, and frowned at him. “Dameron,” she said, “I have you listed as on a rest shift with a medical eval before you can return to active duty.”

“I’m not active,” Poe said, “I’m trying to track down my astromech.”

“BB-8?” Connix gave him a thin-lipped look of disapproval, but then tapped in the droid’s designation to look where ey’d been assigned. “Was with Pava in the first shuttle down to the planet. Seems to have stayed with Pava… huh.”

Poe looked at the logs as well. No record of BB-8; the X-Wing that had gone out with Pava and Rey both in it somehow had Pava’s astromech listed as the navigator. “Then where’d ey go?”

“Hang on,” Connix said, “I saw a reference to em in the comm logs.” She searched. “Mm-hmm… Huh.” She pulled up a transcription. “Poe’s astromech BB-8 is on the shuttle containing Kylo Ren,” Connix read. “Says… Bastian.” She read off the timestamp. “Looks like they used BB-8’s transponder to get a target lock on the shuttle.”

“But the shuttle escaped,” Poe said, stomach twisting.

“It did,” Connix said. She paged down the transcription, and shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry, Commander,” she said quietly, “I don’t see any further references to your droid.”

“Why,” Poe said, “was ey on-- why would ey get onto--”

“I don’t know,” Connix said. “Look, Pava’s inbound, she may have more information.”

Poe shook his head slightly. “If BB was on that shuttle, then ey was on that shuttle,” he said. There was a rushing noise in his ears and everything seemed kind of far away.

“Maybe the gunner from the cruiser knows more,” Kaydel said, “since she used the transponder for the targeting system.” She was scrolling slowly back up through the transcript. “Look, this transcript is only the stuff that got transmitted on the comms. The fact that they didn’t mention the droid at all doesn’t mean there wasn’t a development, it just means that they didn’t say anything for the Order to overhear about it.”

“Maybe,” Poe said, but he couldn’t say it with any kind of volume.

“Hey,” Connix said, “you’d better sit down, hey?”

Poe didn’t go looking for a chair, he just sat down right on the floor and planted his back against the side of the comm machine console, pushing the palm of one hand against the middle of his forehead like it could hold back some of the horror.

“Hey,” Connix said, “hey, breathe, it’s okay, I’ll find em. They wouldn’t have just left em there, BB-8’s got too much information on em for them to just-- let em go off into the sunset with the First Order.”

“There’s a reset protocol,” Poe said, blind with the horror of it, “ey’ll wipe eir own memory banks-- a full wipe, overwrite with zeroes afterwards kind of wipe-- the whole thing, down to eir personality, all gone--” He had to stop because his body was trying very hard to make him gag. That personality was 16 or 17 years’ worth of learning AI development. That personality had been formed by interacting with Poe almost every day. That personality was absolutely unique and irreplaceable, and could not be restored once erased.

“Oh no,” Connix said, “hey, let’s at least find out.” She squeezed his shoulder, then went over to the comm, and hailed the cruiser. Poe wasn’t really hearing her. He sat with his eyes closed and tried to breathe so he didn’t puke. The last thing he’d said to BB-8 had been purposely harsh, to get the little droid to take him seriously about overwriting the personal loyalty protocols. Those hadn’t ever been approved, and he should have been sterner with BB about them, but he never had, and then he’d been left without time to handle it gently.

It wasn’t quite the same as sending a friend to his death, but it was on par. BB-8 wasn’t an organic sentient, but ey was a sentient, and Poe had at least a moment to be thankful that Connix seemed to recognize that. If she’d said anything along the lines of it being “only” a droid, Poe would probably have thrown up by now.

Connix sat down next to him after a moment, close enough that her shoulder brushed his. “Hey,” she said quietly. He realized she’d probably said his name a couple of times. “This is like the flimsi that crushed the cargo loader, huh?” It was a reference to a humorous children’s holo, where a loading droid had been piled with a ridiculous overload, and then the addition of the cargo manifest printed on a single piece of flimsi had finally been too much for it and it had collapsed. It was a frequently-referred-to gag, in holovids made subsequently.

He made a noise that wasn’t a laugh. “Not really,” he said. There it was, “only” a droid— leaving a comrade to commit suicide in enemy hands rather than betray crucial information under interrogation wasn’t really comparable to a scrap of flimsi. More like a hammer blow on top of a lot of hammer blows that left whatever thing was getting beaten a dented, broken-out mess. Hard to tell. “Maybe.” He couldn’t breathe right. He was determined not to throw up.

“The comms lead on the cruiser says the droid’s locator beacon duplicated itself onboard the First Order transport,” she said. “And then one of the two locator beacons separated from the transport. And the one that continued with the transport was a very slightly different frequency, so it’s likely that the original locator beacon was ejected, presumably with droid attached, from the transport.”

“Ejected,” Poe said hollowly. “Like--”

“Well,” Connix said. “Presumably from the refuse chute, since the transport remained operational afterward and did not deviate from course or heading.”

“Doesn’t sound good,” Poe said. A reasonable reaction to finding out a droid had wiped itself to uselessness, beyond even what forensic data reconstruction could recover: dispose of the broken thing to avoid any booby traps or tracking devices, although they’d apparently missed one.

Maybe planting that locator beacon was BB-8’s last act of defiance. Poe was really, really not going to throw up. He really wasn’t. It wasn’t going to happen.

“It’s impossible to say,” Connix said. “And he didn’t know anything beyond that; he only knew that because he was present. Comms has been quite involved in continuing to track the transport via the cloned locator beacon. But, I put a call out on the relay to get to the other cruiser, they might have more information, they deployed a number of X-Wings at greater range.”

“The other cruiser,” Poe said, blinking.

“Ackbar’s,” Connix said. “With the reinforce-- oh, I don’t think you were here. The defectors let spill to Ackbar that Hux was going to be here so he came with another cruiser and a large number of reinforcements.”

“Oh,” Poe said. “That’s. That makes holding the planet a little less. Daunting.”

“Exactly,” Connix said.

Poe scrubbed his hands across his face, then through his hair, tugging at the ends of his hair briefly, and he took in and let out a slow, deep breath. There was a lot of work to do, and no time to grieve-- not even for a small astro droid with a learning AI that had programmed itself into a far more thoroughly-alive and independent creature than many biological sentients ever managed to be. Who had saved Poe’s life easily a dozen times. Who had been a friend. Who was “only”— _stop_ , he told himself firmly, _do not throw up in the command center_.

“But we still have a lot of work to do,” he said, dropping his hands down, smoothing them down his trouser legs, and shoving himself up to sit on his feet. His hands shook, and he had to stop to breathe before he could try to get up.

“We do,” Connix said, “but you need to lie down for a little while, I think.”

“Yeah,” Poe said bleakly.

“I know how important that little astro is to you,” Connix said. “I won’t stop looking. I’ll track down what happened to em and where ey is now, damaged or destroyed or no. At least we know the locator beacon was working. Hey?”

“Yeah,” Poe said. He rubbed his face. “Thanks.” He pushed to his feet, and patted Connix on the shoulder gratefully.

 

 

_____________

 

 

“Hey now,” Karé Kun said, helping to pry open the canopy of the damaged X-Wing. Jessika Pava was in it with the Jedi girl, Rey, sort of wrapped around her from behind. It would have been a compromising position, in any other circumstances. But Rey was clearly semi-conscious, and her head lolled as Pava disentangled herself from her flight harness and the vehicle’s single-occupancy setup.

“Don’t be an ass,” Jess hissed desperately at Karé, as Rey tried to get her eyes open.

“Okay, okay,” Karé said, reaching in to gently help disentangle the semiconscious and struggling Jedi girl’s arms from Pava’s hair, which had been loose. Jess never wore her hair down to fly, but then, she wasn’t wearing the normal helmet and respirator combo either, they must have had to jury-rig a vent system. “Hey, it’s okay, take it easy, Rey, you’re safe now. I’m Karé, I’m just trying to help you so Jess doesn’t get hurt, okay?”

“Where are we,” Rey mumbled, clearly trying very hard to be more alert than she was.

“You’re on the Resistance cruiser _Anaara_ ,” Karé said. “We pulled you onboard after your X-Wing was disabled. Do you remember?”

“Kylo Ren,” Rey said, eyes flying open as she tried to sit up. Karé had hold of her arms, though, and kept her from moving too much.

“Yes,” Karé said. “We weren’t able to stop his transport. We fired on him and he redirected it toward you, and you were only partly able to deflect it. So we figured we’d better not give him any more ammunition to work with, and he got away. But General Organa says we got a tracker onboard that transport, so we won’t have any trouble finding another place to intercept him.”

Rey subsided, at that, and let Karé finish untangling her. Jess climbed out, and then the two of them helped pull Rey out, and handed her down to the crew below.

Karé didn’t fail to notice that Jess stayed with her, climbing down one-handed so she could hold onto Rey’s hand with her other. Well, it wasn’t like Karé was going to be jealous.

“What’s an Anaara,” Rey said, as they got her onto a hoversled to take her to medbay. She didn’t look physically injured, but there was no hiding the way she was grimly struggling to stay conscious.

“It was a city on Alderaan,” Karé said, since she happened to know. “The Resistance renamed the ship after they captured it from the First Order.”

Rey screwed up her face. “Is Alderaan one of the blown-up ones?”

“Yes,” Karé said, because it was true enough.

Karé would have said Rey was asleep by the time they got to medbay, but she suddenly sat up straight and said, “BB-8!”

Pava looked distressed. “BB-8,” she repeated. “Ey was in that transport.”

“Snap’s gone to retrieve em,” Karé said. “Eir locator beacon got ejected from the transport, at least. We’ll see what he comes back with.”

Pava’s astromech was damaged, so Karé went back and helped extricate him so he could be repaired. Pava was too distraught to leave Rey.

Teeny showed up as Karé was working with the mechanics to repair the astromech. She and Cluitt were both onboard, and had both been under guard in the command center as the action happened, at their request; they wanted to be sure they could see what was going on, offer advice if necessary, but most importantly be seen to not be committing sabotage in case anything went wrong.

“General Organa says General Hux told her that he sent us defectors to gauge her reaction and no more,” Teeny said. “So she said she was willing to consider us sincere defectors if that was what we wanted.”

“It’d be that easy, huh,” Karé said thoughtfully, prying a bent bolt out of its damaged casing as she disassembled R4’s badly dented gimbal.

Teeny shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Would that be easy?”

“I suppose,” Karé said, and looked up from her work to make eye contact, “that’s up to you.”

 

______________

 

 

No way was Poe going to sleep, not with the sick twisting horror of not knowing his beloved astromech’s fate weighing his guts down, so he went out to the improvised airfield in the backyard, where shuttles and starfighters and little cargo ships were all busily coming and going, lit by enormous jury-rigged worklights undoubtedly repurposed in haste from stadiums or workshops or the like.

He wandered without purpose, dazed with exhaustion. Everything had a hard bright edge of unreality to it, and sounds were starting to seem hushed and far-off. But as he was passing by a freighter being unloaded, clearly full of commandeered supplies that had gotten redirected from the nearby port, he thought he heard his name, so he paused.

The crew was Fronteras, he sussed that out immediately-- they were speaking Iberican, and the young man nearest him happened to turn so that the light caught the sigil on his cheekbone that denoted his clan. Essin: Poe’s abuelo had been friendly with their matriarch, once upon a time. Poe wasn’t sure who was in charge of the clan, anymore. He knew his old Tio Etto had been pretty high-up with them. He wondered if Etto was the patriarch, now.

“Not _Kes_ Dameron,” said the older man in the shadows, and the younger man grinned broadly.

“Yeah, yeah, him! The Resistance pilot said he was here!”

“Is that the girl that was chasing that astro all over the place like an idiot?” the older man said.

“Yeah, it was a trick though,” the younger man said. “There wasn’t really anything wrong with the astro. It was a diversion so the other astro with her could sneak onto the First Order ship.”

“And do what?” the older man said, skeptical.

“Sabotage, I guess,” the younger man said. “But that was-- the other one was Poe Dameron’s astro.”

“I heard he was here,” the older man said. “I heard he was rhyndo’d, too.”

“Supposed to be true,” the younger man said. “But the girl said, Kes Dameron came out of retirement to get his son back, and I couldn’t credit it, but she swore it was true.”

“It _was_ true,” Poe said, stepping out of the shadows. “He _is_ here. She wasn’t lying.”

Both men jumped, badly startled, and the younger man dropped his datapad. “Xacristo,” the older one said crossly, “you startled me, what are you doing lurking in the shadows like that?”

“Sorry,” Poe said, realizing what a weird thing to do that had been. “I was just-- I’m off-duty, I was just taking a walk, I heard you say Kes Dameron’s name.”

“You’re sure he’s here, son?” the older man said gruffly, by means of reconciliation. “Only I know him, and he said in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t involving himself in any of this tomfoolery.”

“I saw him myself,” Poe said. “Asked him what he was doing here, and he said the world was gonna end anyway and there was no chance he’d manage to die of old age.”

“Yeah,” the young man said approvingly.

“He has a point,” the older man conceded. “Huh. So Kes is really here.”

Poe nodded. “In the flesh,” he said.

“Do you know if it’s true about Poe?” the younger man asked. “Did he really get rhyndo’d?”

Poe shook his head, because he had no idea what story was going to get put around. Should he own up? He was so tired. “Do you know anything more about what happened to that astro?”

“The R-unit?” the younger man said. “A Stormtrooper damaged it but it was still functional.”

“No,” Poe said, “the BB-unit, the little orange-and-white guy?”

The younger man shook his head. The older man frowned. “How’d you know what it looked like?”

The younger man frowned too. “Yeah, wait, what crew are you with?”

“Resistance,” Poe said. “I’m, ah--”

“Ay,” a woman’s voice said, from inside the freighter, “you clowns, we got another shuttle inbound and we were supposed to be done with this one before it got here, are you going to sit out here cackling like chanticlos the whole night or what?”

“We’re going about as fast as we can,” the older man said reproachfully.

The woman appeared in the ship’s hatch, one hand on the controller of a loading droid that was jerkily carrying a stack of crates. “Sure you are,” she said. “Ermo, where is the manifest?”

“Oh,” the young man said, and picked the datapad up off the ground, where it had lain since Poe had startled him. “I just.”

The woman caught sight of Poe, and recognized him precisely at the same instant as he recognized her. It was clear that she couldn’t place him, though. She snapped her fingers. “You,” she said.

“It’s Poe,” Poe admitted. “Hey, Marya.” He shrugged at the two men who were both staring at him now. “I was trying to think of a way to keep it from being weird.”

“Poe,” she said, and then let go of the loading droid and ran over to him, grabbing him by both shoulders and staring into his face. “I thought you were rhyndo’d!” She moved one hand to his jaw, holding his face to peer into it. She was approximately his height, so she could look straight into his face. “You look like hell but your eyes look fine.”

“I can’t explain,” he said. “I really can’t.” She was a relative of-- someone, Poe had never been clear on it. She’d spent some time on Yavin 4, one of those people who was always kind of just around. He mostly remembered her singing and playing music at the festivals and such. She had a fantastic voice and knew all the old songs.

“Holy shit,” she said, and kissed him soundly on one cheek, then the other, before letting him go. “Fuck. That other shuttle is landing, like, now.” She pulled a comm unit off her belt and spoke into it, her Basic sharp-sibiliant. “Listen, callsign M-24 calling in, Berth 4B isn’t available yet, can we switch that incoming shuttle to Berth 6B instead?”

“Fucking hell,” the comm answered in Iberican, and then switched to Basic, “do you copy, Shuttle TX-42C?”

“Shuttle TX-42C to Berth 6B, I copy,” came another voice, and it was Iolo Arana, Poe knew his voice over comms as well as he knew anybody’s. “But I can’t see shit of your berth grids, you don’t have any visible markings at this range, can somebody talk me down?”

Marya sighed heavily, rolling her eyes. “We’ll never get this fucking shuttle unloaded.”

Poe held out his hand. “I will,” he said. She looked at him a moment.

“Sure,” she said, and handed him the comm.

“I gotcha, TX-42C, I’ll guide you into Berth 6B,” Poe said into the comm, and jogged off in the direction Marya pointed him. Fuck, he was tired; his legs didn’t want to move. He hurt all over. He had to drop down to a walk almost immediately.

He’d never worked much on the ground control end of piloting. He knew how it worked from both ends, but he hadn’t done this part of it much.

“TX-42C, acknowledging,” Iolo said, “tell me a signal and callsign to look for.”

The comm crackled with unrelated traffic, the controller trying to get another shuttle to check in. Poe found Berth 6B, and switched on the huge worklight pointing at it. It was a big caged switch and he had to stick the comm in his jacket pocket and use both hands to get the switch thrown. He broke the scab on his knuckles doing it, and his hand started bleeding. He cursed absently, and found yet another of his father’s handkerchiefs, already bloodstained. “This is Berth 6B,” he said, since he didn’t have a callsign on this network. He was used to always using the name of his craft. It was weird not to have one. “Just switched on the light, do you see it, TX-42C?”

“TX-42C, acknowledging, I see the lamp,” Iolo said. “Altering course now.”

Poe found a hand-light stashed at one end of the strip and used it to signal to Iolo as he pulled in closer, staying off the comms as much as he could because there was clearly a lot of other traffic on the overburdened channel. The hand-light was heavy. He wanted to sit down. If he sat down he wouldn’t get up. His hand wouldn’t stop bleeding now. He leaned against the strut supporting the huge worklight and poked, hissing, at the scabs on his hand.

“TX-42C asking Berth 6B to help me, am I clear, I don’t know how long the tail on this thing is,” Iolo said, closing in.

“Berth 6B to TX-42C, you’re lookin’ good, ease those thrusters up a bit because this is a tight field,” Poe said. “I know you know how, Iolo.”

“Fuck,” Iolo said, breaking comms protocol, but didn’t say anything else, and sure enough, he eased up on the thrusters and made a textbook-perfect landing right between the hastily-painted lines of the berth, unloading hatch lined up pretty neatly with the frantically-scribbled indicator marks on the duracrete.

“Berth 6B to control,” Poe said, “Shuttle TX-42C is safely landed in assigned space.”

“Thanks, 6B,” Control said. Poe stuck the comm unit back into his jacket pocket-- it was his father’s jacket, Kes had put it over him at some point. It was too big for him. The cuffs hung down halfway over his hands.

He switched off the hand-light and stuck it back where it had been stashed. Bending over to do so made him dizzy, and he regained his footing with practiced ease; his muscle memory sure was good at compensating for vertigo, now. Ugh.

The unloading hatch hissed and dropped open, and Iolo swung out of it, looking wildly around, and spotted Poe. “I knew that was you,” he said, “I knew-- but how--”

“Hey,” Poe said, and caught Iolo as the Keshian ran into him, knocking him off-balance again, like he needed the help. “Hey, Iolo, hey, hi, how are you?”

“I thought you--” Iolo said.

“Shh, hey,” Poe said, and Iolo pushed himself back a little, clinging to Poe’s shoulders, staring into his face. “Dad told me. I know. On the one hand, thanks for thinking of my folks. On the other hand.”

“I know,” Iolo said, and he was crying, and swore in Keshian, one of the phrases he’d taught Poe-- the really bad one, about estrus, the one Iolo told him would get him slapped if he said it to pretty much any Keshian-- “What the fuck, Poe, what happened?”

“I got better,” Poe said. “I don’t know. I’m okay now.” He knew he had to go give Marya back her comm unit but he wasn’t willing to let go of Iolo. He ran his thumb across Iolo’s cheekbone, smoothing away some of the tears. “It’s fucked-up, Iolo. Listen. Nobody can tell me what happened to my droid. I need,” and he had to stop, because maybe Iolo’s crying was making him need to cry, or maybe it was because now he’d mentioned BB-8. “Iolo, I don’t know where ey ended up and I--” He had to stop again.

“Poe,” Iolo said, embracing him. Then that was a no. Poe managed, just barely, not to let his knees buckle, and hung on. Iolo staggered a little, not really prepared to take his weight. “Oof!”

Poe’s knees _did_ buckle, then, as they’d been threatening to all night. Iolo overbalanced, and they both sat down kind of hard on the duracrete. “Shit,” Iolo said, scrambling over to help him, “I knew you were lying, you’re not okay.”

Poe pulled his knees up, got his elbows on them, put his hands in his hair again. Sometime when all this was over he was going to find someplace private and just lose his shit entirely for like two hours. Maybe he could lock himself in one of the ‘freshers back in the stupid dead Senator’s house. Now wasn’t the time. He pulled himself, forcibly, together, rubbed his hands down his face, and said, “I didn’t really have a lot of hope that you’d know, but it was kind of the last hope I had, so I kind of need a minute,” because he knew Arana hadn’t been on the first cruiser the Resistance sent, so this was a shuttle from the reinforcements, and they were the ones Connix had hoped would know what happened to BB-8.

“Poe,” Arana said, sliding an arm around his shoulders, and Poe clamped down on the last shred he had of self-control, and breathed in very deeply.

“Friend-Poe is sad about _me_?” a droid inquired in Binary, from quite close. “After all those brave words about resetting me?”

Poe froze, and pulled his hands down a little so he could peer over the top of them. Snap Wexley was crouching in front of him, one hand on BB-8’s lower sphere, and BB-8 was oscillating in place a little, looking battered and filthy but undamaged.

“Beep,” Poe said, blank with disbelief.

“Ey ejected emself from the transport’s refuse chute,” Snap said, “and put eir locator beacon on max strength and went into sleep mode until I came and picked em up.”

Poe let his hands drop from his face, and reached out with one hand uncertainly. “Are you,” he said, unsteady, and couldn’t think of a way to finish the question except, “real?”

BB-8 rolled forward a tiny bit, and Poe’s fingertips brushed against eir casing. Ey felt real, smooth and a little unevenly warm depending how close the circuitry was under the casing. “You have violated recommended rest protocol,” BB-8 concluded. “Poe, you look like shit.”

Tears came stinging up through Poe’s whole face and he sobbed, bending double with how much it hurt. “Beep,” he said, and the little droid rolled up into his personal space.

Poe put his arms around em, because he could, because he was here. “Beep, I thought you were dead,” Poe said, and shoved the bloody handkerchief against his face, trying to pull himself together.

“I am not biological,” BB-8 said primly, “I cannot die.”

“It’s the same thing,” Poe said. “You know what I mean.”

BB-8 rolled closer in against him, pressing against his body. “I reset my loyalty protocols,” ey said, sounding a little bewildered, “but it doesn’t seem to have worked.”

Poe made a noise, not sure himself if it was a laugh or a sob. “Maybe you don’t have to,” he said. “Maybe you can stay with me now.”

“I was going to be mad at you for longer,” BB-8 said, “but it’s not working.”

“I’ll be sorry about it as long as you want me to,” Poe told em. “Maybe forever. I’m sorry, Beep, I thought it was the only way.”

“Does sorry mean you won’t do anything stupid like that again?” BB-8 asked.

“Yes,” Poe said.

“Then be sorry forever,” BB-8 concluded.

Poe laughed, and kissed BB’s upper dome near the sensor array. “Okay,” he said.

 

 

______________

 

 

“You did the right thing,” Luke said. Leia let her breath out and turned around. She’d come down in that shuttle, piloted by Arana, with Rey asleep in a little heap studiously attended by Pava, and two dozen additional support staff to relieve the mission control people down here.

“It never feels like it,” she said, turning back to look out the window. She was standing in a sitting room at the end of a hallway, one of the few rooms that hadn’t already been turned into barracks space or administrative offices. The woods below, mostly decorative, were all scarred with overshots and deflections from Pava’s ion cannon when she’d tried to shoot the transport down. The blown-out window of the former conference room was three floors down from here, but the building’s frame was intact enough that the engineers had okayed using this as a base of operations. Leia preferred that, since the senator was dead and nobody living would have to be put out by them commandeering it.

If he were alive she’d’ve commandeered it anyway; he’d been the one who’d invited the First Order here, so it wasn’t as tragic as it would otherwise be that he was the one who’d gotten killed. Hilant had survived, and would lead the planet. How long the Resistance could openly occupy a planet like this remained to be seen.

But BB-8 had just debriefed with her, having seen Poe safely to a bed (Dameron had wanted to stay in the action, but had actually passed out from exhaustion midsentence while speaking to her, which would have been more alarming if she hadn’t seen that exact thing before, and from him in fact) so she had some hope about that too. Having sabotaged a droid that General Hux was known to have a close tie to was a better strategy than an astromech should have been able to come up with by itself, but if any astro could, it would be BB-8. That little astro had a _whole lot_ of nonstandard programming.

“It was, though,” Luke said. “I don’t know if he could have-- really turned you, but--”

“He could,” Leia said brusquely. “It’s-- he could.”

“Ah,” Luke said. They stood in silence for a little while, then, and she eventually leaned her shoulder against his. He sighed, and put his arm around her. “He didn’t, though,” he said.

“He didn’t,” she answered.

“He didn’t damage Rey either,” Luke put in. “She’s fine. She’s-- well, she _will_ be fine.”

“After about fifty thousand calories and forty hours of sleep,” Leia said wryly.

“Just about,” Luke said. “That might not be enough calories.”

Leia shook her head. Luke twitched slightly beside her, and she understood immediately that he was reacting to someone’s presence. She turned her head, and wasn’t surprised that it was Kes Dameron, looking rumpled and sleepy, silent and shadowless in the doorway. She’d’ve heard anyone else coming.

“Did my boy finally go to bed,” Kes asked hoarsely, realizing he’d been spotted and stepping forward.

“He did,” Leia said. “But only after passing out while talking to me.”

Kes grimaced. “That kid,” he said. “Do you know where he ended up?”

“Sixth floor, I think,” Leia said.

“Thanks. I’ll leave you guys to it, then,” he said.

“No,” Luke said, “no, I was just going.” He pulled Leia a little closer, kissed her cheek, then released her and stepped back. “I need to go to sleep too, if I’m going to be of any use.”

“You’d better, then,” she said. Kes stepped into the room a little farther to let Luke out into the hallway, and stood there, watching Luke go, looking uncertain.

“I won’t bite you,” she said a little bitterly, once Luke was well away. She’d never had a man turn her down, but then, she’d never offered herself to one she thought might. It still stung. Luke had told her a little of what had happened, though, and she didn’t figure a man who’d just been confronted by some kind of ghost of his long-dead beloved was going to be up for much playful flirting.

Kes laughed, and stepped away from the wall, turning and finding the control to shut the door. “What if I asked you to?” He turned to look at her, tilting his head a little.

“I don’t bite just anybody who asks,” she said, interested now. She wasn't usually wrong like this.

“Oh, well then,” he said. “I’ll make a wishlist, and you can tell me what I warrant.”

“Well, aren’t you smooth,” she said.

Kes laughed, and pushed away from the wall, wandering over toward the window. “I’ve never actually been smooth,” he said.

“I used to think you were,” she said.

“You were pretty ill-informed, then,” he said. She came and stood next to him, and he turned toward her a little bit. “My dead wife told me to get a life,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of message that is.”

“That’s what she said?” Leia could envision Shara saying that. Not quite in those words, but the sentiment, surely.

He laughed, but it was a bit resigned. “Not exactly,” he said. “But. When she was alive, one time I had a fight with her, and I told her she was going to get killed. And do you know what her reaction to that was?”

“No,” Leia said.

“She sat down and drew up a plan for me,” he said. “Instead of, say, not taking any more risky missions, she made me a plan, for what I was supposed to do if she got killed.”

Leia let out a long breath, grimacing. “That sounds like her,” she admitted.

“Absolutely,” Kes said. “And the number one thing on it was that I had to live, and she explained very earnestly that by that, she meant _live_ live, for real, and that meant I had to date again, and so on and so forth. And I got really mad at her at the time. But. That was about the only way I knew what was happening, with that Force-echo or whatever it was. I knew it was really her because she brought it up.”

“She did,” Leia said, astonished.

“Among other things,” Kes said.

“She told you to sleep with me,” Leia said, trying to fill in until she understood.

“No,” Kes said, “not that specifically.” Poe’s eyes looked more like his mother’s, but there was something to the crinkles at the corners of Kes’s eyes that were reminiscent of Poe now. Well, probably vice-versa; he’d been at this longer than Poe, surely. “But she did say she was sure she’d see me again and so I had better have something to report.”

“That’s both creepy and enticing,” Leia said.

“My specialty,” Kes said. Leia laughed, and he stepped a little closer to her. “Listen,” he said, a little more seriously. “You’re at a tactical point where you’re going to start having bases that aren’t covert. This planet’s your protectorate, now.”

“Yes,” she said, even more intrigued. What did it say about her sex drive, she supposed, that an attractive gentleman talking war strategy was even more exciting than same talking about romance?

“Yavin,” he said. “There are two planets and a spaceport, and I was the last holdout on the harbor council advocating neutrality.”

“Really,” she said.

He nodded. “My point was that neutrality would keep us safe,” he said. “Hosnia taught us that there is no such thing, and my sudden involvement here is going to be plenty to get Yavin knocked off the neutral list.”

“That’s true,” she said.

“So,” he said. “We can evacuate some of the wounded there, certainly. And if you come meet with the Harbor Council, I think they’d be amenable to both a base and a spaceport, which would help you keeping your big starcraft supplied.”

“That is something we’re short on,” she said. “You really-- you were pretty dead set against us, Kes.”

“I was,” he said. “But out of practicality, not ideology, you know that. You know about my father. You know what my people had to do.”

Leia didn’t remember, precisely. She remembered all about Kes’s mother; nobody could forget Lita Dameron. But she did not remember his father, and she had a feeling that was relevant. “You might need to remind me,” she said.

His mouth twisted. “We had to disavow him and say we thought he was dead,” he said. “Because he was with the Rebellion, and we were afraid of the Empire’s vengeance. Why do you think I phrased it quite that way with Poe? We had to disavow him, say he was dead to us, to avoid being targets for retribution. Sometimes that’s not enough, but it’s all you can do, if you can’t hide.”

Leia had completely overlooked that as a factor in Kes’s dismissal of Poe. She wondered if Poe had understood that.

“But we’ve reached a point where the Resistance is entering into open war,” Kes said. “So there’s no more refuge in neutrality. The First Order might start destroying planets and resources just to keep you from getting them, have you prepared for that?”

“We’ve thought about it,” Leia said grimly. “We’re not strong enough to prevent it, yet.”

“Let it happen one time,” Kes offered grimly. “Although, I think Hosnia should be enough of a warning, for that.”

“You’d think it would have warned more people,” Leia said.

Kes shrugged. “Takes time for the message to work in,” he said. He went over and sat on the sofa overlooking the window. It was more a daybed, properly, with an arm along one side and no other edges. “Anyway. Come to Yavin with me. Base one or two of your cruisers out of there, then the port will be protected, even if it’s a target, and we’ll make it worth your while with the port traffic.”

It helped that she could see, now, what was in it for him; she could more easily take his offer as genuine. The fact that he’d known that only compounded it. 

“I accept your proposal,” she said, and sat next to him. “I’ll come speak with your council.”

He glanced over at her, slouching a little, appealingly, and smiled. “I’m thinking about accepting your proposal,” he said.

“I was kinda getting that impression,” Leia said. Weirdly, she was a little shy about it now. She took one of his hands between both of hers. “Wanna give it a shot?”

“Then we’d both have something to report,” Kes said, and she laughed then, like she hadn’t in a long time. It felt good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a long, strange trip it's been.  
> I still have to write the epilogue with the spiritually-uplifting threesomes, as Deputychairman so succinctly put it. But I figure this wraps up the main story. I hope I haven't left any loose ends. Do remind me, if there was something you were invested in that I forgot to address; it turns out this story kind of... sprawled, a little, and there are surely things I meant to do more with that I've forgotten about.  
> So the epilogue, as yet untitled, will be coming shortly. I think it's probably best to give it its own title, so if you're subscribed to just this story, you won't get a notification, but I'll post it to the [series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/468505), so you'd get a notification if you were subscribed to the series.  
> The series also includes the prequel stuff, which you may or may not be interested in-- I've been writing stories about how Kes and Shara met, and I have some semi-ambitious plans that depend on what's in Rogue One when it comes out, because that's the same time period. So, if you think you'll be into that, stay subscribed to this series too; those are all in a sub-series called [The Lost Kings](http://archiveofourown.org/series/510541), so if you're not interested it's easy enough to tell which is which. Anyway. There's my awkward administrative trivia rambling.  
> Otherwise, thanks for sticking around for the long haul. Please stop by & say hi over on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bomberqueen17) if the mood strikes you. I've basically spent the hellish year of 2016 finding a little bit of happiness over here, and it's been magical, but I could not have done it without all of you. Even just a kudos matters, and I thank you for it. :)

**Author's Note:**

> I can't get to my Tumblr to link to the post where I asked for help with pickup lines but I would like to thank everyone who participated. Also what does it say that I had to go back five, six months to find the thread? Christ this story is taking forever. Thanks a million to everyone who is still reading this. I promise, I promise I won't betray you and it will be worth it.


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